


Lehnsherr & Xavier, Attorneys at Law

by Lindstrom



Category: X-Men (Alternate Timeline Movies), X-Men (Movieverse), x-m - Fandom
Genre: ADHD, Alternate Universe - Lawyers, Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Modern: Still Have Powers, Charles Xavier has a Ph.D in Adorable, Erik Logic Is The Best Logic, Erik is a Sweetheart, Hurt Charles, M/M, MeToo movement, Mutant Politics, Protective Erik, Sebastian Shaw Being an Asshole, Slow Burn, Smitten Erik, Workplace Sexual Harassment, civil rights for mutants
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-10-13
Updated: 2020-07-05
Packaged: 2020-12-14 15:21:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 13
Words: 70,850
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21017942
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lindstrom/pseuds/Lindstrom
Summary: Broke and hungry, former billionaire and new law school graduate Charles Xavier takes a desperation job at Frost & Shaw, a small civil litigation law firm. His mentor, Erik Lehnsherr, is gorgeous, awkward, and keeping secrets . . . some of them dangerous. Charles has to face his own weaknesses if he’s to help Erik, and when they land in the biggest mutants rights mess since the 1960s, Erik’s secrets just might destroy them both.





	1. Confrontation

**Author's Note:**

> Note the tag about sexual harassment. Workplace sexual harassment (inappropriate comments, and reference to some groping) is a plot point. The aftermath of sexual harassment threads through several chapters.

“Just for a few years. Two, just two years,” Charles offered desperately. His trust fund expired and he became direct owner of 35% of the stock of Xavier Pharmaceuticals in just under two years, when he turned 25. He was only asking for two years of freedom before the Company took the rest of his life.

Sharon Xavier-Marko was upset. Therefore, she must be placated, and Charles was losing ground. She didn’t answer verbally, but her displeasure deepened at this evidence that Charles did not intend to back down entirely. It was always harder to maintain his mental shields when the situation was emotionally charged - an unpleasant paradox that weakened his defenses right when he needed them most.

“It will be better for the Company in the long run if I have broader experience to draw on,” Charles said. His voice shook as badly as his innards, the way it always did when he displeased his mother. That’s why he did it so rarely.

“If I thought it would be better for the Company, I would have arranged it myself,” Sharon said. She poured herself two fingers of brandy and threw an accusing look at Charles: _ Do you see what you force me to do? _

His mother knew he wouldn’t be able to avoid hearing that thought. Charles knew that if he replied to it, she would accuse him of reading her mind without her permission.

“I’ve gotten a job offer from Yates, Mahtam & Anuwat. Think of how much international business experience I can gain in just two years. And the connections I can make. It can’t help but be enough of a benefit to offset the delay,” Charles pleaded.

Sharon knocked back the brandy. The force of her anger stole the next sentences from his mind. He’d thought them all out so carefully, hoping that if he camouflaged his own wishes inside bettering his qualifications to someday be CEO of Xavier Holdings, his mother wouldn’t notice what he was doing.

“You have a job offer from the most prestigious international business law firm in the world,” Sharon mused.

Charles nodded. When her voice softened like that, it meant she was about to attack.

“Which is why Mevion-Chiyoda hired them for the Novogene case,” Sharon went on as Charles innards stopped shaking and froze entirely. “Ansat so cleverly played up our connection to EverChem Biotech so they were conflicted out of representing _ us.” _

The Novogene case had been decided in Charles’ 1L year, and he’d enjoyed a bit of fame with his classmates for being one of the Xaviers of _ Xavier Holdings International, Inc. v. Mevion-Chiyoda Pharmaceuticals, Inc. _ even though Xavier Holdings International lost the case on summary judgment. The case was on appeal now.

His mother had taken the decision as a personal insult, and she never forgot or forgave an insult.

Charles had not paid any attention to the names of the law firms involved. Several of the questions he’d been asked during his job interview now made more sense, in a sick and gloating way. 

“I would still like to take the job,” Charles said. Now it sounded like he was asking her permission. That wouldn’t do. “I will take the job.”

His mother poured more brandy.

Charles had come across the phrase ‘high-functioning alcoholic’ during his Psychology 101 class as an undergraduate. He’d thought that if his mother were a low-functioning alcoholic, she might be easier to deal with. For one thing, he could pity her instead of being afraid of her.

_ Ungrateful, egotistical, tiresome little freak. _

He couldn’t let any reaction show on his face. His mother hated his telepathy, even when she used it against him like this.

_ Why couldn’t I have a normal son? And while we’re at it, a taller one too. Not that he’d get engaged to Lily Eversoll even if she weren’t 5’10”. Everything else wrong with him, and he has to be gay too. _

Coming out of the closet the year before he started law school had been the last time he’d displeased his mother, and that conversation had gone about as well as this one. His mother wasn’t a homophobe, as it wasn’t fashionable anymore, but she did resent the lost opportunity to marry him off to advantage. Gay marriage may be legal now, but that didn’t mean the super-rich had come around to the idea of merging their empires with a union that wouldn’t produce an heir who was genetically related to both sides.

In the end, it was the rank dislike dripping off her thoughts that steeled his spine. His mother would dislike him if he took the job at Yates, Mahtam & Anuwat. She would dislike him if he caved in right now and agreed to start work at Xavier Holdings next week. During his lifetime, there had been several times Charles had been able to win his mother’s approval, but it occurred to him now that he had never once gotten her to like him. He’d always been too small, too bookish, too timid, and then his telepathy manifested and he’d become an outright embarrassment. 

“I’m going to take the job. I don’t care what you say,” Charles said, and then he turned and walked out of the room.

“You should be more worried about what I do about it, Charles,” Sharon said.

In a fit of bravado, Charles turned and shouted, “I’ll be fine on my own!”

Sharon smiled. “You’ll find out what that means soon enough.”

Suddenly afraid at the inchoate threats pouring from her mind, Charles ran out of the house. He’d moved back home to study for the bar exam, but he wasn’t going to stay here tonight, where he would risk hearing her thoughts again. Emerson would let him sleep on his couch. He could come back tomorrow and retrieve his belongings.

* * *

By the next morning, his cell phone service had been cut off. His email accounts on the family server had been disabled. He should have printed off the job offer letter from Yates, Mahtam & Anuwat because he would need it before he could sign the lease on a new apartment. He called the law firm to ask them to email another copy to his newly-created gmail account.

“Hold please,” the receptionist said, then his call rang through to Aidah, his contact on the hiring committee. 

That’s when Charles realized just how angry his mother was.

“There’s been a change of plans,” Aidah said smoothly in her barely-accented English. “I apologize for the inconvenience, but it has become necessary to rescind the offer of employment.”

Charles gaped like a dying fish, glad this wasn’t a video call. He tried to politely ask for clarification, but Aidah wouldn’t say anything more. 

He found out his credit cards had been cancelled when he tried to buy gas. His debit card didn’t work either; the ATM told him the card was invalid. Of course his mother was on his financial accounts. She’d paid his tuition and living expenses through college and law school.

Then Emerson apologetically said he couldn’t stay a second night. “I’d let you stay here as long as you wanted if it was up to me,” he’d said. Then he wouldn’t explain what he was talking about.

Charles found out when he wasted another 14 miles worth of gas to drive to Alisa’s apartment. She had the decency to look ashamed of herself when she told him that she’d gotten a phone call suggesting that her own job offer would be in jeopardy if she helped Charles in any way. He assured her he understood completely and didn’t blame her at all, and then walked back to his car. Most of his other friends from law school had already left to start glamorous jobs in far away cities, and he was now too humiliated to try and approach anyone else who was left. 

Then he tried to go back to the house to pick up some of his things and Thomas wouldn’t let him in or bring anything out to him.  
“Very clear orders, Mr. Xavier, I’m so sorry.”

“Not even my laptop?”

“I’m very sorry,” Thomas repeated.

The hell of it was that he was sorry. Thomas had always been a decent sort, and Charles couldn’t ask him to risk his job just to help him. Charles stood there in the suit he’d been wearing yesterday when he’d walked out of the house and realized he had nothing but the suit he was wearing, a non-working cell phone, and his car. He should have planned better. He should have planned anything at all.

Raven might have helped him if she’d been in the country. Or not. They weren’t close anymore, but she might have brought him some of his clothes.

At the bank, Charles found out that he couldn’t get a credit card without an address and proof of employment.

“But anyone can get a credit card!” Charles protested. “Those pre-approved credit cards come in the mail all the time!”

“Pre-approved offers are mailed to addresses,” the bank clerk had said, “to people who are pre-approved because they are employed.”

Charles had not known that. He’d taken classes about the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, how to repatriate funds from Asia, and the international anti-terrorism financial regulations, but he didn’t know how an ordinary person got a credit card.

While walking out of the bank, he remembered a savings account he’d opened, almost by accident, a few years ago that was solely in his name. He drove to the branch across town, with a nervous eye on the gas gauge hovering close to empty, transferred the money into a checking account and found out it would take a week to get a debit card that would be mailed to his home address. Charles declined the debit card and got a wad of cash instead. He coasted into a gas station on the fumes to buy fourteen gallons of gas and then bought a cellphone. 

The car got repossessed from the parking lot of the extended stay motel where Charles paid cash for a week’s stay, feeling like a criminal on the lam. His mother's name was on the car title, not his. He had $4,892.17 left, and no idea how long that would last. He’d email blasted his resume all over New York City, for all the good that would do. 

He spent two days watching soap operas and daytime talk shows, wondering if the Jeri Creech Hour would listen to him pitch a segment on “Mothers Who Financially Destroyed Their Sons” and he could earn some money by going on TV.

On the third day at the motel, he had a panic attack and sobbing breakdown so violent he wondered if he should check himself into an emergency room with a mental health crisis. Then he realized he most likely did not have health insurance anymore. Charles had his mental health crisis sprawled out on a scratchy bedspread in a cheap motel with rust stains in the sink.

The next day, he checked out of the motel and bought a Greyhound bus ticket to Avalon, Pennsylvania.


	2. First Day

The good thing about having a new associate start today is it meant that Erik Lehnsherr would no longer be the firm’s most junior member. Having a new peon below him in the pecking order could only be a good thing, and the reason for that was sitting in the corner of his office -- document review. Two boxes filled with hard copy discovery, and the three thumb drives in the manila envelopes taped onto the boxes were full of the explosive facts that would make or break their client’s case, or that was the idea anyway. The truth was, there were no explosive facts in a contract dispute. There wouldn’t even be any interesting facts; the most one could hope for were facts that didn’t make you fall asleep and drool on the documents, not that that had happened to Erik, or at least not more than once. Fine, twice. 

Document review was the bane of a newly-minted lawyer’s existence. A month ago, when Erik had sent out the discovery requests over Frost’s signature, the chore of reading and indexing all of the responsive documents was going to land in his office. All that had changed last week, when Emma Frost made the surprise announcement that Frost & Shaw, Attorneys at Law, had made a last minute hire. 

Erik had been relieved, then dismayed. As next-most junior associate, he would be training the noob. His law school buddy, Clint Barton, had once consoled Erik about his grades by pointing out that the most dangerous thing in the world was a newly-accredited lawyer who had graduated in the top 10% of his class. This was true. Smart people who didn’t know that experience mattered more than bookish brilliance could do a lot of damage.

This new associate was, unfortunately, too smart. Anyone who had been on the editorial board of Columbia Law Review (what was an Ivy League grad with  _ Law Review _ on his resume doing at a firm like Frost & Shaw?) was too smart. Anyone who followed up that ridiculous bit of resume padding (okay, fine, it was a legitimately impressive accomplishment and no one did Law Review just for the padding) with an LLM in Global Business Law was too smart. Anyone who had interned for two summers at Xavier Holdings, Inc. in both their London and Hong Kong offices was too smart.

Wait. 

Erik hadn’t looked closely at the resume, just shoved it into a drawer after a quick glance, but the litany of reasons why he disliked this new hire had just connected with the new hire’s name, and he went shuffling through the papers in the drawer in search of the resume, because he had interned at Xavier Holdings, and . . .

Holy shit. Charles Xavier. There was no way that name was a coincidence. It’s not like it was Buffett, Gates or Stark or another billionaire name common enough that it could have been a coincidence. The Xavier family’s golden boy was coming to work at Frost & Shaw? No way. With new interest, Erik scanned the rest of the resume. Charles’ undergraduate degree was a double major in biology and genetics from Oxford, which should have put him into patent law for the family business before he took over running the company entirely. Really, this resume was for the next CEO of Xavier Holdings, not for a junior associate at a crappy civil litigation firm in Avalon.

At the bottom of the resume was the inconspicuous notation “M - C1 Telepath.” The C1 category meant communication only. The C2 category was for telepaths who could both communicate and control people. There was a law now that said mutants didn’t have to disclose their identity as a mutant, nor the category of their mutation. The privacy provisions had been part of the repeal of the Mutation Registration Act in 2014. And, just like the laws that said you didn’t have to disclose your family status, it meant that many mutants voluntarily disclosed their mutation and its category. Erik’s subpage on Frost & Shaw’s website was marked “M - Telekinesis” (which, yeah, could have been more specific, but the official mutation category was Telekinesis, and if you didn’t have to disclose at all, you could certainly keep a few details to yourself). All of them at Frost & Shaw were mutants. Erik had joined the firm hoping that meant they would be politically progressive and interested in civil rights. His mistake. 

And that was enough time wasted. He had hours to bill if he was going to even come close to making the billable quota this month. Erik set the resume back in the drawer and pulled up the reply to the motion for summary judgment in the Bachman Contractors case that Shaw had assigned him. Shaw had asked for a rough draft. Erik intended for it to be so perfect that Shaw wouldn’t need to ask for revisions. The less contact he had with Shaw, the better. Besides, they were likely to lose on summary judgment no matter how good Erik’s brief was. The Letter of Intent stated that the opposing party still needed to obtain funding, so their client’s argument that they hadn’t known the entire deal might fall through was weak.

There was no case law exactly on point in the Third Circuit, and Erik was deep into an analysis of why the court should follow a case from the Ninth Circuit on this issue, rather than using the Second Circuit case cited in the motion itself, when a knock on his open door broke his concentration. He looked up, and his hand automatically attracted a paperclip to rub while his stomach gave its customary clench of tension at seeing both Frost and Shaw standing in his doorway, wearing their condescending professional smiles. Between them was a teenage boy with a death grip on a zippered leather portfolio.

Wait.

Said teenage boy looked to be wearing a charcoal pinstripe suit tailored like only the Italian tailors could do. Like, real Italian tailors who lived in Italy, not the Italian tailors who moved to the U.S. and opened tailoring shops which were still more expensive than Erik could afford. Erik bought his suits at the mall.

“Erik, this is Charles Xavier. We’re very happy to have him at the firm,” Shaw said, putting a hand on Charles’ shoulder.

Of course Frost & Shaw would be happy to have Charles Xavier at their firm. It would be rather like Jocko’s Vape Shop managing to hire Prince Harry as counter help.

Charles cringed away from Shaw’s hand just a fraction, and his determined smile became a little more plastic. Magda would be proud of him for noticing that Charles had just gone from nervous and awkward to downright uncomfortable. Now he needed to figure out why, and how he should respond.

He’s a telepath, Erik thought. Most telepathy was enhanced by physical contact, and Shaw was sloppy with his mental shielding because of his relationship with Emma. Something might have leaked through the shielding when he touched Charles, and it was making Charles uncomfortable. Anyone who was uncomfortable around Shaw was Erik’s new best friend. 

Reinforcing his own mental shields so as not to force unwanted impressions into Charles’ mind, Erik reached out his hand just far enough away from Charles that he had to step forward to shake Erik’s hand, which broke his contact with Shaw. On closer inspection, Charles definitely wasn’t a teenager. Despite being shorter than average and clean-shaven to the point of being baby-faced, his shoulders were filled out and he had a strong handshake. 

“Erik will be giving you your first assignments,” Shaw was saying, “and you can ask him any questions you might have if you can’t find me or Emma. I hope you’ll feel comfortable coming to us with any concerns. Like any small firm, we’re very close-knit, and it’s best to get any concerns out in the open where they can be dealt with to the satisfaction of everyone involved.”

Shaw was giving Erik that condescending smile combined with a warning look. Like hell Erik was going to smile back at him. He picked up a few more paperclips, rubbing the ridges against the pad of his thumb, and felt a mental nudge against his shields. That made him whirl to give Frost a sharp look. Mental incursions were against every ethical code telepaths were trained to follow. “Excuse me?” he said, holding Frost’s gaze firmly.

Frost raised one of her perfectly sculpted eyebrows in confusion. 

Erik should have kept his mouth shut. Of course Frost would play dumb. He couldn’t decide if he was stupid or she was unfair. Probably both. Erik hated ambiguity.

“Nothing, never mind,” Erik muttered, wishing he had more stuff on his desk so he could pretend whatever he was looking for was lost and demanded all his concentration.

“Oh!” Frost exclaimed, “did you think I did something? Did it feel like telepathy? Charles, we keep to the Casey-Kenton Standards for the Ethical Use of Telepathy in our office. It’s understandable that you’d want to get to know your colleagues, but please stick with baseline methods. No harm done, right Erik?”

Charles looked aghast. “I would never!”

Shaw interrupted him before his protest could get any further. “It’s alright, Charles, I’m sure Erik will let it go this once. Erik does tend to misinterpret things, and read more into a situation than anyone intended, but once you get to know him, he calms down some.”

The paperclips in Erik’s hand had wrapped into a ball, and the metal legs on his cheap desk were shaking slightly. He hadn’t misinterpreted anything, ever, and especially not anything involving Shaw. He was abysmally stupid and trusted the wrong people, but that was all. Now they’d just set him up to look like an over-sensitive whiner who would make false accusations about Charles’ telepathy. 

“If that’s it for the introductions, I can get Charles started on his first assignment,” Erik said abruptly, tossing the mangled ball of paperclips back into the holder. He couldn’t be any more obvious about telling Frost and Shaw to leave than that.

It worked and they left. 

Erik swung the door shut behind them with a flick of his power against the door knob and dropped into the swivel chair behind his desk, picking up a new paperclip and turning it over and over in his fingers. Charles took the only other chair in the room, still clutching his leather portfolio and looking very uncertain. 

“Welcome to Frost & Shaw,” Erik bit out.

“Thank you?”

Now that the firm’s eponymous partners were gone, Erik huffed out an angry sigh and thought of a diplomatic way to ask a very rude question. It was a skill lawyers had to cultivate. “Were there any specific areas where you hoped to gain experience before you move on to a position that will offer better opportunities to someone with your qualifications?” That was the lawyer-speak translation of ‘what the hell is someone like you doing here?’ 

Charles set his leather portfolio on his knees and considered the question. The skin between his eyebrows wrinkled with thought, finely-arched, mahogany-dark eyebrows that accented the most amazingly blue eyes Erik had ever seen, now that Erik had a chance to look at him without the tension that accompanied any interaction with Shaw. He was going to have to think of some synonyms for blue, because blue was not enough of a word to describe the color of Charles’ eyes. Lawyers eschewed single syllable words when there were words like ‘azure,’ or ‘sapphire’ or even ‘cerulean.’ 

Wait.

He couldn’t do this. He could not crush on the new associate. Erik was a fourth-year associate and Charles’ direct supervisor, and the power imbalance meant any romantic interest would be sexual harassment. Erik would never do to anyone else what Shaw had done to him. Ergo, he would not think of the blueness of Charles’ eyes or the redness of his lips or picture himself stroking that smooth jawline with his thumb while he kissed that exquisite mouth until Charles moaned with pleasure and melted against Erik while begging for more. No, he would not do this. At least, not without his mental shields firmly in place because his very thoughts could constitute sexual harassment if a telepath was involved. This principle had not yet been tested in the case law, but Erik was sure it would make a very convincing argument. 

Damn. Shaw. Erik should warn Charles about Shaw. Except Shaw had just warned Charles that Erik was over-sensitive and misinterpreted innocent situations and made false accusations. Erik now had another reason to hate Shaw. He picked up the mangled wad of paperclips again and rubbed them furiously with his thumb, hand under the desk so Charles wouldn’t see him fidgeting.

“I liked the firm’s pro bono mutant representation program. Would there be a chance I could be involved in those cases?” Charles asked.

What? Oh right, Erik had asked Charles why he’d taken a job here. That answer revealed that the only information Charles had about this law firm came from reading their website, because the website made the pro bono mutant representation program sound a lot more impressive than it really was. On the website, it sounded like Frost & Shaw were crusaders for mutant justice regardless of one’s ability to pay. In reality, the whole idea had come from Erik, and Frost only tolerated it if Erik didn’t let the pro bono cases interfere too much with his billable hours.

“Yes, we don’t have any active pro bono cases right now, but I promise you’ll be involved in the next one that comes in,” Erik said. 

“Thank you,” Charles said politely.

He was very polite. Normally, Erik disliked polite people, but he would make an exception for Charles, and not just because of those melting blue eyes. He would think of another reason to make that exception as soon as he knew more about Charles.

To keep his thoughts where they belonged, Erik skipped the rest of the polite conversation segment of meeting someone new and got down to business. “Your first assignment is right there.” Erik pointed at the boxes. He dropped his paperclips, picked up the top box and opened the door. “Get the other one. You’re in the office next to Janos, right?”

“Yes,” Charles said, hauling up the box and balancing it on his hip. He might get dust on that Italian suit of his. Erik did not think about brushing it off for him, sliding his hand down Charles’ hip.

“This is a contract dispute,” Erik began as Charles trailed him down the hall towards the only office in the firm that was smaller and more utilitarian than Erik’s. Erik dropped the box on Charles’ desk and explained that Jayno Packaging was suing their client, DJP Health, for non-payment. Their client’s defense was that Jayno’s product had not met contract specifications. Essentially, the companies were spending tens of thousands of dollars to argue about child-resistant caps on pill bottles. Erik didn’t see the point. Jayno’s bottles met FDA standards, which was all DJP’s contract specified. Privately, he thought DJP was looking for a way to get out of the contract with Jayno without paying the termination fees. He hated it when they ended up representing the party who was in the wrong.

“And all of this is . . .” Charles said, waving his hand at the boxes and thumb drives.

“Responses to requests for production,” Erik replied. “When you create the index, mark which response the document corresponds to. Also have searchable fields for all parties involved, and summarize the content. Mark the most pertinent documents in an executive summary index, Frost likes those.”

“I create an index?” Charles asked.

“Yes, you create an index.”

“I see.” There was a pause. “Which administrative support professional will be assisting me?”

Charles thought he got a secretary. That was just so damn adorable that Erik wanted to hug him while he cried once Erik said what he had to say.

“There are eight attorneys and two secretaries, and we’re at the bottom of the pecking order. If you’re super nice to Angel, sometimes she’ll send a fax for you, but that’s about all the help you’ll get.”

“A  _ fax?” _ Charles’ professionally polite smile wavered. 

“Attorneys use the paperless technology of today, yes we do, but we also never let go of any technology from the past,” Erik explained. “That’s why you’ve got so much paper, along with the thumb drives. I bet there are faxes in those boxes somewhere.”

“I see,” Charles said faintly.

It appeared that the news about faxes had blown Charles’ mind and he wasn’t processing the fact that he didn’t have a secretary. Erik would have to remind him.

“You do know how to create an Excel spreadsheet, right? I’d use that for your index.”

“Of course I know how to create an Excel spreadsheet!” Charles replied. He shrugged out of his Italian suit jacket and hung it up on the coat tree behind the door. It swayed. The new guy got the broken coat tree. His pressed blue shirt had pintuck pleats at the wrist, and was made of that creamy fabric that disdained to be clingy, choosing instead to skim the planes of Charles’ chest in a way that made suggestions but left all the details to Erik’s willing imagination.

“Let me know if you have questions,” Erik said, and left before his imagination got out of hand.

* * *

Charles sat down in the cheap swivel chair as Erik left and logged into his computer before he opened the boxes. Reams and reams of paper filled the boxes. Thousands of documents, tens of thousands of pages, plus everything on three thumb drives, all needing to be indexed to a request for production. Apparently, Charles was supposed to know what a request for production was, and how to index documents for it. Well, he hadn’t graduated near the top of his class at Columbia because he couldn’t figure out hard things. 

And there was no reason to figure out hard things if Google could do it for you. Charles typed a few search terms into Google and came up with gold. No problem here. This assignment was going to be tedious, but he would blow them all out of the water with how well he would do it. He would even impress that abrupt, stern supervising associate. Would it have broken the man’s face to smile? Would a smile be anywhere near as sexy as that brooding look he wore so naturally?

Charles fingers began creating an Excel spreadsheet while his mind churned over the strange dynamic between Emma Frost, Sebastian Shaw and Erik Lehnsherr. Erik thought Charles had used his telepathy against him. But Charles had clearly felt the mental flick when Frost had reached out to tweak Erik’s mind. Then Shaw had cut him off before Charles could defend himself, and the entire episode had gotten squashed under what appeared to be long-standing office politics. Just great. He was here two hours, and he was already involved in office politics.

A tedious hour crawled by. Charles looked up eagerly when someone tapped on his door. It was Angel, the administrative assistant who would send faxes for him if he was super nice to her. 

“Hello! Come in. What can I do for you?” Charles greeted her cheerfully. 

“Oh, you’re sweet! I just thought I’d stick my head in and see if you needed anything. Any IT issues? Get logged in okay? Any formatting questions or stuff like that?” 

“I think I’m doing alright. I’ve got the index set up and the basics of this transaction figured out. Do you want to look and tell me if you see anything I’ve missed?” Charles offered.

“You want my opinion? For reals? You’re so sweet!” 

That was the second time she’d called him sweet, and he wasn’t even being super nice yet.

Angel hung over his shoulder until Charles could get out of his seat so she could sit down at his computer. She scrolled through his index and pointed. “You’ll want to tag the names with Plaintiff or Defendant. It makes it easier to sort later. And you’ll need another cell to cross-reference stuff to the privilege log.”

“Thank you, I’ll do that,” Charles said.

“Cool!”

“Do you have a minute just to chat? I’ve been looking at this until I’m going cross-eyed and would love a chance to talk. Tell me about yourself,” Charles said as they switched seats again.

Angel perched on the edge of a chair, leaving room for her lacy dragonfly wings, and chatted. She'd lived in Avalon since her mother moved them here after her mutation manifested in her early teens, got hired by Frost & Shaw right after high school and had worked here five years, liked superhero movies and Greek food, had a crush on a redhead named Sean who worked at the hedge fund office two floors down, and wished they had better dental insurance. 

Talking to Angel was a breath of fresh air. For one thing, she wasn’t shielding like everyone else here. Charles didn’t pry, he never pried, but he liked to look. 

The street he had lived on for three weeks now was a row of brownstones, and some of the tenants left their curtains open after dusk, with the lights on. That lit up the interior, and Charles liked to look in the living rooms. There was nothing wrong or creepy about looking, was there? The one place had a big golden retriever who wiped its nose all over the window and barked greetings. The other place had a toddler, which was such a happy mess of a house. Then there was the living room with all the intense modern art on the walls. There was a living room with that elderly couple who sat on the couch together, reading separate things. The sad living room had the man who seemed to always be sitting in the same place every evening with the only light coming from the TV screen. 

Anyway, he never peeked into living rooms through closed curtains, same as he would never pry into the mind of someone who was shielding, even if they were doing it badly and he could have looked if he wanted. But people who weren’t shielding were like living rooms with open curtains. It was alright to take a glimpse and get a general sense of a person. Angel had a layer of bravado and cheer laid over pain she’d grown accustomed to, was surprised that Charles was listening to her so attentively, and glad to have someone new at the office. See? Nothing about that was prying. Charles could have learned most of that about her without using any telepathy at all, it was just that the mental sense was such a nice connection. He got lonely when everyone shielded.

They talked and chatted until Angel jumped up. “I didn’t mean to keep you so long!”

Charles glanced at the time. Half an hour. That wasn’t a long time to just sit and talk, was it?

“Billable hours and all,” Angel said apologetically. “I didn’t mean to get you behind on your first day.”

Right. Billable hours. One couldn’t bill for chatting with the only friendly person in the office.

“Anyway, so glad to talk to you! It took Erik about four weeks before he would even say ‘hi’ without me getting right in his face and insisting he answer me when I said good morning. You’re a nice change but don’t tell Erik I said that!” She breezed out of his office.

Charles’ smile turned into a chuckle. It just now occurred to him that Erik’s definition of ‘super nice’ was probably anyone else’s definition of ‘basic social skills.’

About an hour after that, Janos walked into Charles’ office, telling a petite woman with long black hair, “This is the new guy.”

Charles stood and held out his hand while Janos introduced him to Elizabeth Braddock, who had been meeting with a client when Frost and Shaw had introduced him around the office earlier that morning. “My friends call me Betsy.” 

Someone was being friendly! Charles’ smile grew wider. “So nice to meet you, Betsy!”

“She didn’t say you could call her Betsy,” Janos said.

Charles smile disappeared. Janos wasn’t smiling, and it looked like he might be serious. Charles didn’t think he’d misread what Elizabeth had said, but he couldn’t check without violating the Casey-Kenton Standards for the Ethical Use of Telepathy.

“You’re freaking him out, Janos, shut up. Of course I meant you can call me Betsy,” Betsy said, punching Janos in the shoulder.

“Ow! Sexual harassment! Stop! I was just checking to see if he’s got a sense of humor, unlike our other associate,” Janos said.

“Get over it, Janos,” Betsy said, rolling her eyes. 

“Does he have to be so weird?” Janos protested.

“We’re on our way to a meet and confer about vitally important discovery involving a department store’s clean-up procedures,” Betsy said, ignoring Janos, “or we would take you to lunch. Don’t let Erik give you a hard time if you actually eat, okay?”

Charles said, “okay,” because it seemed that he was supposed to say that, and then Betsy steered Janos out of Charles’ office while he suggested taking Charles with them as a rescue operation. Their voices disappeared down the hallway.

After another hour, Charles couldn’t ignore the hunger pangs. He’d been waiting in hopes that Erik would invite him to lunch to welcome him to the law firm. It hadn’t happened. Maybe he could drop some hints?

Charles walked to Erik’s office. “Hello there!”

“Hi, what did you need?” Erik said, without turning away from his computer monitor.

“I wondered if you’d had lunch yet.”

“Lunch?” Erik looked away from the monitor to give Charles a puzzled look.

Charles couldn’t resist. “Yes, lunch. It involves eating food. Sometimes conversation happens. You know. Lunch.”

Erik was looking at him as if he really had never heard the definition of lunch before. “I usually just have a Coke at my desk.”

That explained the man’s tapered waist, but did not explain his total lack of social skills. Anyone could see that Charles was fishing for an invitation. Exasperated, Charles asked, “What do you do if you’re actually hungry?”

“Have a granola bar too.”

That was too much. Not even Charles could persevere in the face of such refusal to catch a hint.

“I’ll leave you to it, then,” Charles replied.

He was halfway down the hall, hoping someone had left crackers in the break room, when he heard Erik calling his name. Charles turned.

“Do you want to go get lunch?” Erik asked.

Brilliant. He would put a gold star on Erik’s forehead if he had a gold star. “If you’re going to get something to eat, I’ll go with you,” Charles said.

“Sure,” Erik said, and fell into step next to Charles.

He didn’t say lunch would be his treat, but maybe that would come up once they were already at the restaurant. Charles had mostly been living on scrambled eggs these past three weeks. Eggs were cheap protein. Sometimes he got bread too, from a day-old bread store where everything was half price. At some point after he got a paycheck, he would buy a toaster and some butter. When Charles had signed the lease on his one-bedroom apartment, they’d asked for a deposit and two months rent, which was more than they usually required but Charles hadn’t had a job offer when he’d signed the lease. That had cleaned out his bank account. Actually, he was $112 short of what they wanted, but he’d pleaded and his landlady said alright. He kept his dwindling wad of cash a secret from his landlady and spent it on eggs, secondhand clothes, and the leather portfolio from the New2You Thrift Shop that looked nice as long as he kept the palm of his hand positioned over the rip. 

He’d joined Frost & Shaw at the beginning of a payday cycle, which was two weeks, plus a week for processing. His first paycheck wouldn’t come for three weeks.Once he had the job offer letter and an address, he’d been able to get one credit card from a dodgy bank called Pinch and Stiff Bank that would likely send a thug named Whack Whack to break his kneecaps if he missed a payment at 22% interest. And he would miss the first payment because of the payday cycle. 

He was sleeping on an air mattress he’d found at New2You that deflated in the middle of the night, and he had to go the library for the free wi-fi if he wanted to use his phone for anything but email, since he was on the stingiest data plan possible. Internet, electricity and gas were not included in his rent, just water and garbage. 

Which all explained why Charles was wearing a $3,000 suit and really hoping that Erik would offer to buy his lunch. 

“So what’s your favorite place to eat lunch?” Charles asked as they exited the building. There was an Italian bistro across the street next to a soup and sandwich chain cafe, a Chinese restaurant next to Jocko’s Vape Shop half a block down, and a place called Himalayan Kitchen that was advertising a $9.99 lunch special. 

“I don’t know,” Erik said, looking around as if he’d never noticed restaurants before. 

Oh, damn. The only way this day could get worse is if Charles ended up paying for Erik’s lunch because Erik didn’t know it was traditional for the new guy to get a free lunch on his first day of work. He was really going to have to make an effort to remember Erik’s lack of social skills.

“Anything has to be better than a granola bar at your desk, right?” Charles suggested.

“I like granola bars.”

Of course he did. 

“How about the Himalayan Kitchen?” Charles said. If he did end up paying for Erik’s lunch, then that would only be $20 plus tip, and he could likely pay that off before Whack Whack got to him.

“Okay. Do you like Himalayan food?”

Erik had asked a conversational question. This was encouraging. Maybe he would pay for Charles’ lunch and Charles wouldn’t have to worry about Whack Whack after all. “Yes, I love Himalayan food,” Charles said. 

“I’ve never had Himalayan food,” Erik confided in him.

“True, I don’t believe they make Himalayan granola bars,” Charles replied, getting the door for Erik. 

After they were seated, Charles instantly said he’d have the special, but Erik was looking at the menu. The menu was covered in items that started at $15.00 and went all the way up to $40.00. For  _ lunch. _ For only $9.99, the special likely consisted of tap water and floor sweepings. Now he wouldn’t get anything good to eat, plus he would have to pay for Erik’s $35.00 entree, and still have to worry about Whack Whack. He breathed a sigh of relief when Erik said he would have the special too, and then it turned out the special was a buffet. All he could eat! Charles had never been so happy. It was strange how these last four weeks had totally changed his ideas of what would make him happy. Food was happiness. A regular paycheck was happiness. Having a place to sleep indoors was happiness.

He piled everything onto his plate and left Erik lingering over the choice between curry with bone-in goat meat and chicken tikka masala. Charles had taken both and was halfway to clearing his plate before Erik returned to the table.

Erik may not have social skills, but he did have good table manners. Now that the edge was off his hunger, Charles enjoyed watching him. He had long fingers, and a careful air about him. Perhaps what had seemed to be sternness to Charles was really just caution. His movements were all deliberate, from the way he cut his food to the way he chewed. Erik didn’t seem to be the sort of person who would ever cut loose and do something spontaneous. Charles may have seriously thrown off his routine by getting him away from that granola bar at his desk.

Maybe that caution was something else, though. Charles had a misunderstanding to clear up.

“Erik, I want to assure you that I would never use my telepathy on you. Whatever you felt this morning was not something I would do,” Charles said. That was as close as he could come to blaming it on Emma Frost without saying it outright.

“I know. It was Frost, then Shaw tried to make it sound like I’d make a false accusation,” Erik said. His hands clenched on the silverware.

Office politics. Charles wanted to steer clear of that. 

“Your mental shielding is very good,” Charles assured him. Erik didn’t just have the curtains drawn, he had the blinds down, the lights out and the front door locked. Also a flashing neon sign that said ‘keep out of my head.’

“Frost is a telepath. I learned shielding,” Erik said curtly.

“I wouldn’t pry anyway. I wouldn’t,” Charles added, afraid he might have suggested he would test the strength of Erik’s shields. 

“Smart,” Erik said with a shrug.

That didn’t leave any room to continue the topic. Charles finished off everything on his plate and went back for seconds. He would ask the server how long this special continued. He could spend $10 a day on food if he only ate once a day. He was so tired of scrambled eggs.

Erik was still fastidiously working on his first serving as Charles plowed into his second helping. He decided to make another effort at conversation to slow himself down.

“Have you lived in Avalon very long?”

“I moved here after law school, when I got the job,” Erik replied.

A singularly unenlightening response. He would make a terrible witness.

“I’ve always wondered what it would be like to live someplace like Avalon,” Charles said.

“Why?”

“Because of the mutant population of course,” Charles said. Why else? When mutantism had first caught the public’s attention shortly after World War II, statisticians had predicted a mutant takeover, with humanity being replaced by mutants within four generations. Like pretty much all predictive statistics ever, it turned out to be wrong. The number of mutants held steady at one mutant per 10,000 humans, and that was only if you counted the useless mutations like someone who could turn her ears purple and things like that. Being a mutant was awkward enough that they tended to band together, informally and unofficially because anything else would be considered segregation, which was technically illegal. 

Mutant magnet cities like Avalon sometimes had a mutantism rate as high as 12%. Genosha had almost a 35% mutant rate, but that was that strange 250,000 acre settlement in New Mexico full of militants who were proud of the fact that their founder had been that metallokinetic mutant terrorist, Max Eisenhardt, and his wife, Wanda the Witch. It had been two generations since he died (or was assassinated, depending on which websites you read), and public opinion still ran high against mutants. The Eisenhardts had single-handedly set mutant rights back by fifty years, and their failure was enshrined in the disastrous 1974 Supreme Court opinion,  _ Eisenhardt v. United States,  _ which said mutants had no constitutional rights to use their mutations. Mutants were much better off in the European Union and Brazil.

“Yeah. Lots of us here.” 

Charles gave up on trying to draw Erik out into conversation. Both of them needed to get back to the office and back on the billable clock. Charles finished his second plate of food about the same time that Erik finished his first. He wished he could go back for thirds, but he was afraid he’d make himself sick. All that good, rich food on a stomach that had nothing but scrambled eggs for a few weeks might not sit well.

When the check came, Charles hesitated, suddenly ashamed of himself for mooching off Erik. He would pay it back someday, he really would. 

Erik slipped his credit card into the pocket and the server retrieved it. “Lunch is my treat, since it’s your first day and all.”

Charles had yet to see him crack a smile, but it was still kindly said. Charles was craving kindness as much as he craved food. 

“Thank you, that’s very kind of you,” Charles said, with his most sincere smile.

There was almost the ghost of a smile on Erik’s face when he replied, “I don’t get told I’m kind very often.”

“Well, I’m a very good judge of character,” Charles said.

The ghost of a smile turned into a small, tentative smile. “I’ll take your word for it.”

After that, they talked of child-resistant medicine bottlecaps all the way back to the office. Charles dove back into his documents review project in good spirits, happy with a full stomach and the possibility of a friend, even an awkward one. 


	3. Logan

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> cw: workplace sexual harassment

Erik couldn't help noticing what Charles wore to work every day, and it puzzled him. Charles had that expensive Italian suit, and the rest of his wardrobe consisted of ill-fitting jeans on the weekend and cheap khakis with cheaper pullovers on the days he didn’t wear his Italian suit. Was Charles trying to fit into the firm better? True, no one else had a $3,000 bespoke Italian suit, but no one else was quite as bad at the business casual dress code as Charles was. The one cardigan he wore almost every day had threads fraying at the elbows, almost as if he’d found it in a secondhand shop. It would have been unbearably personal to ask Charles if he needed some fashion advice, so Erik didn’t ask. Someone like Charles Xavier would have a personal shopper. Although he ought to fire that personal shopper and hire a decent one. 

Besides the clothes, Erik noticed that Charles had a passion for Himalayan food. He ate at that restaurant every day that week. Erik could see the restaurant from his office window, and he turned to look at the restaurant a few minutes after Charles walked to the elevator around lunchtime and would see Charles entering. He wished he could work up the courage to invite himself along, but Charles hadn’t asked again, and Erik assumed he would have asked if he’d wanted his company. Besides, the trouble with Shaw had started with the lunches.

Food, clothes and work. The first two were none of Erik’s business, but he could check on Charles a couple times a day because he was supervising him. 

“Hi,” Erik said, appearing in Charles’ doorway. Today he wore a green v-necked pullover and khaki slacks. Erik had noticed earlier that the khakis were too big on him; the cuffs skimmed the ground and were quickly getting worn out. “Any questions?”

“Yes, when does this end?” Charles replied.

There were papers stacked all over Charles’ desk, with post-it notes and scraps with handwritten scrawls on them. Charles was working on a thumb drive now.

Charles’ woe made Erik feel guilty about how gleefully he’d looked forward to dumping this project on the new associate. “It never ends. Once you get through all of this, there are follow-up requests and then discovery disputes, then you have to actually start writing the briefs. Oh, and you’ll probably have to attend depositions. It could be years. Probably will be, actually, civil litigation drags on forever.”

Charles whimpered, and put his head down on his folded arms. Erik had an urge to run his fingers through that wavy, dark brown hair and pull Charles onto his lap and assure him that nothing is as bad as the life of a first-year associate. It would get better.

“How’s it going with Frost?” Erik asked. At least this was Frost’s case, and not Shaw’s. Emma Frost was a nitpicky tyrant, but she wasn’t Shaw.

“Oh, you know,” Charles said disconsolately. “I’ve had to rework the index twice. Once because she wanted me to change it, then the second time to change it back because it turned out the way I was doing it was the best way to begin with.” 

Erik chuckled at that. Charles smiled back. “I think that’s the first time I’ve seen you smile.”

That surprised Erik. Not that he hadn’t smiled in weeks (that was normal), but that Charles was paying as much attention to Erik as Erik was to him. That put a real smile on his face, and Charles actually laughed. 

Angel barged in, waving a couple of papers. “Erik! Guess what? You’ve got a new client for the mutant pro bono program! Here, he just showed up with this.”

Erik took the papers from Angel. It was a printout of the intake form on the Internet. They were supposed to fill it out online and submit it through the website. Instead, this guy, a Logan Howlett, had filled it out in block handwriting, leaving most of the form blank. Where it asked for his birthday, he’d just written ‘old.’ Where the form offered a place to indicate a mutation category or check the box for ‘prefer not to say’ he’d filled in ‘healthy,’ which wasn’t a mutation category at all.

“A client? A real client? A flesh and blood individual who needs our help?” Charles was all smiles.

“You want to take a break from pill bottle caps?” Erik asked.

“I will tear myself away from pill bottle caps by the force of my desire to wreak justice in the world,” Charles declared.

“Here, type this address into google maps first,” Erik said, pointing at Logan’s home address. He wanted to get a rough idea of whether or not this guy had any money.

Charles typed it in, then went to street view. Logan Howlett lived in a rundown trailer park on the west side of the train tracks with a rusty swingset in the side yard and a car up on blocks at the neighbor’s trailer. Yep, he needed free legal services.

“What’s he need help with? Discrimination? Free speech? Civil rights?” Charles demanded. 

Injustice apparently flipped a switch in Charles and turned on all his passion and animation. Erik was going to find ways to regularly confront Charles with injustice, just so he could watch the show. Flipping to the second page, Erik scanned the sheet and told Charles, “he needs help getting his military pension.”

“Oh.” Charles deflated.

“Not all injustice is exciting,” Erik observed. 

“Yes, well, it will at least be a change from pill bottle caps,” Charles said.

“I put him in the small conference room,” Angel said.

“Who’s in the small conference room? Erik, do you have a client?” It was Shaw. Erik locked down all the tension that instantly pooled in his stomach. His eyes slid past Shaw without making eye contact.

“It’s one of Erik’s pro bono clients,” Angel explained.

“Oh,” Shaw replied, immediately losing interest. “I won’t keep you then. I came by to talk to Charles. Emma said she wouldn’t mind if I borrowed him for a couple of hours.”

Erik’s hackles went up at the idea of Emma acting like she could loan out Charles to Shaw. They didn’t  _ own _ him. “Charles was coming with me for this meeting. You remember that our pro bono mutant representation program was one of the reasons he chose to work here.” 

“I could come talk to you right after. I don’t imagine this will take very long,” Charles volunteered, smiling at both of them in turns.

Charles was a pleaser, and that was going to be a problem.

Shaw smiled that smug, condescending smile. “Erik can get pretty possessive, can’t he? Don’t let him push you around too much, Charles,” Shaw said, and put an arm around Charles, squeezing his shoulder. That uncomfortable expression flickered across Charles’ face.

Very subtly, so Charles wouldn’t notice but Shaw would, Erik pushed back on Shaw’s watch with his power and got his hand off of Charles. Shaw’s smile got bigger, which made Erik want to hit him hard enough to wipe that smile off his face. He didn’t, though, he didn’t even yell, though his stomach churned and he had to chant ‘impulse control’ at himself.

“He’s been quite helpful,” Charles replied. “He’s not pushing me around at all.”

Charles had just  _ disagreed _ with Shaw, right to his face, after only a week and a half of working here. That took guts. Maybe he wasn't a pleaser.

“If you’ll excuse us, I’d rather not leave our client waiting,” Erik said, and walked away. Charles caught up to him in a couple of steps. The law office was fairly small, so they only walked side by side for a moment or two, but long enough for Erik to wish it was a longer walk. He would like Charles by his side more often. The thought made him smile, and suddenly he wanted to tell Magda all about Charles.

“That’s twice in the same day,” Charles said.

“Hmm?”

“You’ve smiled twice today,” Charles said. 

Charles was counting Erik’s smiles. Erik couldn’t keep the third smile from splitting his face in half, so when he entered the small conference room, Logan Howlett got the benefit of what Erik had been told was a grin reminiscent of a shark. It was enough to startle an answering smile out of Logan, and it didn’t look like Logan smiled very often either.

The man was big, taller than Erik and bulkier through the shoulders and chest. Black hair and long, bristly sideburns obscured most of his face, but he could have been any age between 40 and 60. He wore a leather jacket over a t-shirt and jeans, frayed but clean. Strangest of all, he seemed to be full of metal. 

“Mr. Howlett, my name is Erik Lehnsherr and this is my colleague, Charles Xavier,” Erik said. “Please have a seat.”

“Uh, okay. You can call me Logan.” Logan pulled out one of the leather office chairs, much nicer than what Erik and Charles had in their offices, and sat down nervously. 

Erik sat down, and was relieved to see Charles had brought a legal pad and pen. It amused him to think he had an assistant who could take notes for him. Smile number four, right there. It usually took him three days after a conversation with Shaw to even feel normal again, and today he kept smiling. One smile from Charles was enough to overpower an entire conversation with Shaw, yes it was.

“There’s no need to be nervous,” Charles assured him. “Why don’t you tell us what we can do for you.”

“They stopped sending me my pension checks,” Logan said. “They said I ought to be dead by now, so I’m not eligible anymore. I need those checks. I mean, sometimes the manager at my trailer park will let me trade work for the lot rental, but I still gotta pay the bank, right? And I can’t actually starve to death because of my mutation, but I still like eating, and I can’t buy food without my pension. I don’t do so great working anymore. Things make me nervous, jumpy, you know? Bad trait for a security guard to get jumpy. I got fired. They were right to fire me, I shouldn’t have attacked that trespasser like I did. But he spooked me is all. Since I got fired for cause, I can’t get unemployment. My pension was all I had, and then it stopped coming.”

“You don’t have enough to eat? You can’t pay your rent?” Charles asked.

His tone was outraged enough that Erik glanced at him, and was surprised to see a sheen of tears in his eyes. It occurred to him that Charles had probably never personally met someone who was hungry and worried about his next rent payment. It was kind of him to care that deeply about a problem he couldn’t possibly identify with. Erik was going to move past having a crush on Charles into being completely in love with him, just because he got teary-eyed about a complete stranger.

“We can help with that,” Erik assured Logan. “Did you bring any letters you’ve gotten from the pension office?”

Logan handed over a ratty manila envelope, and Erik shook a stack of correspondence onto the conference room table. “Which war did you fight in?”

Logan shrugged. “All of them up until mutants got banned from the military. Civil War, Spanish-American War, World War I, except back then we called it the Great War, then World War II, Korea, Vietnam, my last tour of duty was in the Persian Gulf. That Mutant Noncombatant Treaty put me out of the only real job I'd held in more than a century.”

Erik stopped sifting through letters to stare at Logan.

“It’s my mutation. I can’t die. The doctors call it spontaneous cellular regeneration. I was only getting a pension from World War II. And they said I’m too old now and should be dead. They accused me of fraud.” He gave a short laugh, not at all humorous. 

The hardest things about these cases was that the reason someone like Logan showed up in the office was not his biggest problem. But it was the only problem they could help with. 

Charles didn’t know that yet -- how little they could do. “What about the VA? Have you talked to them about the possibility of counseling for PTSD? And maybe they could help you get a job in a different line of work.”

“No one wants a washed-up soldier who can’t get his head out of the war anymore,” Logan said. 

“But counseling!” Charles insisted. “There are support groups and things.”

“Doesn’t do any good, kid. My body heals, not my mind and not my heart.”

“There must be something,” Charles persevered.

Smile number five was pasted to his face, probably slightly dopy with affection, as Erik watched Charles pepper Logan with suggestions and help. Erik’s master plan involved opening his own law practice as soon as he could afford it. He’d always pictured himself as a solo practitioner, but his plans just expanded to include a partner. Then he brought himself back to reality. Billionaire Charles Xavier may want to go slumming at Frost & Shaw for unknown and obscure reasons, but he wouldn’t want to spend his career as Erik’s law partner.

Logan was starting to look a little overwhelmed at Charles’ plans to fix his entire life in one afternoon, so Erik broke in. “My associate and I will go through these letters and make some phone calls, get the appeals process started. Is there a phone number where we can reach you?”

“I don’t have a phone. No money, remember? You can write me a letter. Post office still delivers those. Or you want my neighbor’s phone number? She might give me a message you called, if she’s not high anyway. I can always borrow a phone and call you back,” Logan suggested.

Charles wrote down the neighbor’s phone number, along with the note to ‘leave message if not high.’

Logan was looking back and forth between the two of them, and his body language suggested he had something else to say, so Erik said, “What else did you want to ask?”

“I can pay you. Not right now, but if you can get me my pension back, I’ll pay you, even if it takes a few years.”

“No, my friend, you won’t,” Charles said before Erik could reply. “Someone who has given so much in service to his country deserves all the help we can give, and then some. We are the ones who should be paying you, so you will please do us the honor of allowing us to help with this small problem instead.”

Damn, Charles was good. Besides that, he was right. “After what you’ve done, this country owes you a pension at the very least. We’ll be in touch as soon as possible.” 

Erik stuck out his hand and Logan took it, bemused. Then he gave half a laugh and shook his head. “Alright, bub, you got me with that one. Thanks.”

They walked Logan to the elevator and waited with him. Logan told Charles he reminded him of someone he’d known at Dunkirk, so Charles had to hear the story. One story led to another, and several elevators came and went while Logan told stories. At last, an elevator came when Logan was between stories, and he got on it after one more handshake each.

When the elevator door closed, Charles’ smile got even bigger, which Erik hadn’t thought was possible. “Now I’m glad I went to law school!”

“You weren’t before?” Erik asked, knowing exactly what Charles was talking about, but still wanting to hear him talk when he was happy.

“Pill bottle design versus the inherent dignity of a veteran? Please!”

“I guess military pensions aren’t so boring after all,” Erik replied.

“It was the story! Someone should write that man’s memoirs. Someone should make a movie out of that man’s life. Several movies, really. What an amazing person! I wonder if I could find a therapist willing to work with him.”

“I bet you could.”

Charles looked thoughtful. “You really changed him, you know that? When we first met him, he was discouraged and pretty sure he wasn’t worth the effort to even come talk to us. By the time he left, he was feeling optimistic again, like he was worth something. The way you treated him changed him for the better. And I got to watch.”

“You got to help too. Don’t discount what you said to him,” Erik replied, then the import of what Charles had said sunk in. “Wait, were you reading his mind?”

“Oh, no, no, no. I wouldn’t do that. But he didn’t have any shields up, and his emotional state was right there on the surface where I couldn’t avoid knowing it.” Charles looked at Erik nervously. “Couldn’t you tell he was sad at first and then felt better as we talked? By the time he got on the elevator, he was in a good mood. Couldn’t you tell? You didn’t have to read his mind to know that, right?”

Erik had to remind himself to notice how other people were feeling. Now that Charles had pointed it out, he could see Charles was right. “Yeah, he did cheer up when we talked to him. I guess it would make anyone feel better to know he could get his money back.”

“You idiot! It wasn’t that at all! You treated him with respect and told him he deserved better than he was getting! That’s what did it.” Charles punched him in the shoulder and Erik pretended it hurt, both of them laughing.

“Let’s watch out for the physical contact,” Shaw said, appearing out of nowhere. “We wouldn’t want anyone to get into a situation that could be misinterpreted.”

Charles and Erik straightened up, the fun falling away into the tension Erik always felt around the office.

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean anything by it,” Charles said, shooting a worried look at Erik.

“I know that,” Erik said shortly. “I don’t misinterpret things.” He tried to hold Shaw’s gaze, but the gloating was too much for him and he looked away.

“I suppose we’ll get back to work now, yeah?” Charles suggested into the awkward silence.

“Come to my office, Charles. I’ll talk to you about that project I mentioned earlier,” Shaw said.

_ Don’t ever be alone with him, _ Erik wanted to shout. He wanted to drop his mental shields and force the warning into Charles’ mind, but he didn’t. Erik was too tense around Shaw to ever relax enough to drop his shields, or to eat during work hours, or to enjoy his job, or even to feel like a normal person again. Instead he just stood there, watching Charles walk with Shaw to his office, and he didn’t say a thing.

* * *

The next Tuesday, Shaw took Charles to lunch to officially welcome him to the firm, two weeks after he'd started. Shaw said Emma Frost wanted to come, but got caught on a conference call and sent her apologies instead. So it was just Shaw and Charles.

They went to Bailer Street Grill, a swanky steak and seafood place with agonizingly slow service, but large enough portion sizes that Charles planned to ask for a take-out box and eat dinner that day too. His joy at the steak, baked potato and steamed vegetables almost over-powered the awkwardness of the company. Almost. Shaw kept smiling at him, which was unsettling. People should not chew and smile at the same time. 

Charles was usually good at small talk. He kept people at a distance by being pleasant and friendly. He could chit-chat endlessly with store clerks, people on the bus, and friends of friends. That’s why it bothered him that the conversation with Shaw was so strained. Listening to Shaw praise his intelligence and potential was awkward, because he couldn’t agree without sounding conceited or disagree without sounding like he was fishing for compliments. Yes, he was settling into the firm just fine. Yes, his assignments were interesting. That was a lie, but what else could he say? Yes, he felt like he could ask questions when he needed.

“Erik isn’t giving you a hard time or anything? He can be hard to work with,” Shaw said. Shaw’s shielding was inconsistent, and something almost predatory flashed out, catching Charles off-guard. He hadn’t meant to feel any of Shaw’s thoughts. Charles strengthened his own mental shields in response, to avoid any more flashes like that.

“I’ve enjoyed working with Erik,” Charles said, more concerned with spreading the butter and sour cream around his baked potato than in discussing his mentor.

“Well, if there’s anything, anything at all, Charles,” Shaw stressed, leaning over the table until Charles looked up from his potato, “I want you to know you can come talk to me. You don’t need to put up with anything that makes you uncomfortable. We’ve had people say some things about Erik.”

Charles was getting the feeling that those office politics were getting out of hand. He filled his mouth with baked potato so his only response would be nodding.

Shaw kept smiling at him, patronizing and predatory. Charles licked butter off his lips, and then wished he hadn’t, because something in Shaw’s expression changed when he did that, and he found himself looking away and pushing up even more mental shields to keep Shaw’s thoughts out of his mind. Maybe Emma Frost liked it, but Shaw ought to know not to let loose with thoughts like that around another telepath. Charles had already been shielding well enough to avoid any inadvertent thoughts; Shaw had intentionally pushed those creepy thoughts at him.

The lunch was finally over, and Charles could put his take-out box in the breakroom fridge and get back to work. Shaw had given him a reply to a motion for summary judgment to edit, which made a nice break from document review, although it was going to be awkward to tell Shaw that the brief was a mess. The citations were wrong; the legal analysis was conclusory in two of the four sections, and the facts were confusing. For some inexplicable reason, Shaw wanted the document edited in handwritten red pen instead of using the computer like anyone else.

Charles ended up writing suggestions on post-it notes and sticking them to the page once he ran out of room in the margins.

“Hey, how are things?” Erik said while tapping on Charles’ door.

It must be time for Erik’s mid-afternoon check on him. Erik was very predictable. It said a lot about Charles’ life right now to know that Erik checking in on him was the high point of his day. It certainly helped that Erik was very easy on the eyes, all rangy height and rugged angles.

“I have a serious question,” Charles replied, leaning back in his chair. “How do you tell a senior partner that his writing is crap and he just needs to delete the whole thing and start over?”

Erik’s gaze fell on the brief spread all over Charles’ desk. He’d pulled the staple out and set out all the pages. “Is it that bad?”

Charles almost ranted about how bad it was, but something in Erik’s expression stopped him before he said a word. “You wrote it, didn’t you?”

“The Bachman Contractors case? Yeah, I wrote that.” A flare of something furious blew its way over Erik’s expression and then was gone in a conscious decision. It was enough to confirm that Erik had a temper, and that made Charles nervous. He hated to get yelled at.

Charles pasted a rictus-like smile on his face while he tried to come up with a way to walk back his comment.

“You’ve asserted the writing is crap. Do you want to retract that statement or prove it?” Erik pulled a chair up to the desk, helped himself to a handful of paperclips, and lifted an eyebrow at Charles. The fury was gone from his mind, and the mental shields that had leaked at the onslaught were stable again. He seemed calm. Some people were like that; one blast of anger and then it was over. Charles relaxed a bit.

May as well go for broke and prove it. A fellow law review editor had accused Charles of being arrogant about his writing and editing skills. Charles had replied that it wasn’t arrogance if you were right; it was confidence. Charles slid a page over the desk to Erik. “This here. You’ve quoted a case, and then jumped right to the conclusion, without saying how the case applies to our facts.”

“Isn’t it obvious? I already said the facts.”

“I think it would read better if you briefly summarize them again here, rather than expecting the judge to remember what you said six pages ago,” Charles suggested.

“Okay. What else?” Erik challenged him.

Charles leaned into the challenge. Law students liked to argue, and they liked to write, and putting those two activities together made for some very heated discussions. Erik didn’t give an inch until Charles had made his case, but the only time he seemed genuinely angry was when Charles had been willing to concede a suggestion just because he felt bad he was shredding Erik’s writing. “Fine, it sucks and you’re wrong,” Charles had snapped back at him, and Erik had grinned. Charles relaxed further as he realized Erik wasn’t going to yell at him, or punish him for speaking his mind. This was actually kind of . . . fun.

Erik borrowed a pen and was taking notes over the top of the notes Charles had already written when Shaw interrupted them.

“What are you two doing?”

Charles waited for Erik to answer, since he was the senior associate, but Erik’s expression had gone blank and he was rubbing his thumb over the paperclips he was holding like it was the most important thing he could be doing right now. So Charles said, “I found out that Erik wrote this reply you asked me to edit, so I was going over it with him.”

“Charles, I asked you to report back to me on that project. Erik shouldn’t have pre-empted those instructions.” Shaw said this with that omnipresent smile on his face, the one that made him look like he was wearing the mask of a nice guy without knowing what should be behind the smile.

Another glance at Erik, who was staring at the wall to Charles’ left. “Erik didn’t pre-empt anything. He was checking on me, and then recognized what I was working on. We were just talking about it.”

“You can’t bill for that conversation,” Shaw said.

Charles deliberately dropped his shields and focused on Shaw. He sensed that Shaw knew exactly how he affected Erik, and he liked it. That made Charles angry. Only cruel people enjoyed making other people uncomfortable. 

“That’s fine. I enjoy talking to Erik enough that I’m willing to do it for free,” Charles replied with a warm smile at Shaw. Erik may not know how to play mind games, but Charles had been raised by his mother, a master manipulator, and Shaw was child’s play compared to Sharon Xavier-Marko. “The structure of this brief is so well-done that I’ve been able to get right into editing the text. You know how the heaviest editing comes right before it’s perfect? I’m really impressed with the organization. And here I thought you’d written something this good!”

Erik glanced away from the wall to give Charles a rather dry look. Charles resisted the temptation to wink at him, but only because Shaw would have seen it.

Shaw’s eyebrows quirked in irritation without disturbing that smile. “Why don’t you bring it to my office and we’ll go over it.”

“I’ll sit in,” Erik said.

“You can’t bill for it,” Shaw repeated.

Erik shrugged. “I never make quota anyway. Take it out of my paycheck. Again.”

Charles stacked up the loose pages of the brief, wondering about the bizarre dynamic between Shaw and Erik. Erik seemed so strong, but there was something hangdog and ashamed when he was around Shaw. Charles didn’t even need telepathy to sense it; it was in Erik’s expression and body language. 

Charles felt Shaw’s outright anger that Erik would insist on coming to Shaw’s office with him. Erik stood up, and the look that had been nervous and awkward had steeled into a warning. Then that intense look shifted to Charles, and Charles could feel the wave of protectiveness flowing over him. Erik wasn’t afraid of Shaw on his own account; he was afraid for Charles.


	4. Hungry

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know nothing about military pensions. I'm just making stuff up to fit the plot.

The thing was, Charles knew if he called his mother and admitted he was hungry and asked for money, the first words out of her mouth would not be: ‘you poor dear, let’s get you some food.’ No, the first words out of her mouth would be: ‘have you learned your lesson yet?’ And then he would only be allowed to eat once he had agreed to let her run his life again.

In less than two years, on his 25th birthday, Charles would become a billionaire again when his trust fund expired and he directly owned 35% of the stock of Xavier Holdings, without his mother controlling it as trustee. That was such a long ways away.

Two days ago, Charles got a text message from Pinch and Stiff Bank stating that he had maxed out his credit card. It wasn’t hard - the limit was only $750 and he’d had to put down deposits to turn on the utilities at his apartment, and buy necessities like a bus pass, an air mattress with a slow leak, the cheapest clothes he could find, a few toiletries, and a frying pan for all those scrambled eggs. Also, he’d set aside $10 in quarters for the laundromat, though he was toying with the idea of washing his clothes in the bathroom sink so he could use the quarters for vending machines. He’d called the bank and asked for another couple hundred dollars in his politest, most financially reliable voice. They’d turned him down because his first payment was already late. 

That meant no more lunch specials at the Himalayan Kitchen. 

Angel’s mother had baked banana bread yesterday and Angel had brought it to work and left it in the breakroom for everyone to share. Charles had eaten four pieces, one at a time so no one would notice. He couldn’t count on banana bread again today.

Angel was nice. If he told her he needed to borrow money for food, she’d give it to him in a heartbeat. Charles couldn’t face that level of humiliation yet. Instead, he’d struck up a conversation and casually asked what people did if they needed money to make it to payday, making it sound like a friend was asking. “A payday loan, obviously,” Angel had said with a roll of her eyes for Charles’ clueless friend.

Which was why Charles was standing outside of Fast Money Payday Loans at 7:30 in the morning. It turns out they didn’t open until 8:00. The extra time was bad. He was second-guessing himself. Besides which, the blinds were already open and it looked like Whack Whack himself was manning the counter. Weren’t payday loans a racket? Would he regret this the rest of his life? Did it matter, as long as he could eat?

“Hey.”

Charles startled, and then his face flushed when he recognized Erik. “What are you doing here?” he blurted out, rather than saying something casual and normal.

Erik turned and pointed back the way he had come with the manila folder in his hand. “Parking garage.” Then he turned the way he had been going and pointed. “Work.”

Yes, it was a little too early in the morning for complete sentences.

“Good morning,” Charles said belatedly, and hoped Erik wouldn’t ask what he was doing on this particular patch of sidewalk. His bus stop was two blocks the other direction, and he hadn’t known their office parking garage was right there. He fell into step beside Erik, because he had no excuse to keep standing on the sidewalk in front of Fast Money Payday Loans.

“Have you had breakfast yet?” Erik asked.

“Ah, no, not this morning,” Charles said, as if he ate breakfast on other mornings. Erik wasn’t shielding as strongly as he usually did, and Charles caught a glimpse of Erik’s pleasure in running into him outside the office. 

Erik grunted, and swerved to open the door to Bella’s Cafe, which enveloped the sidewalk in the heavenly aromas of syrup, butter, coffee and pastries. “Let’s talk about Logan’s case before we get to the office.”

Brilliant idea, truly brilliant. If he inhaled hard enough, would he get enough calories to sustain him for the day?

Erik ordered a kale smoothie and handed over a debit card.

Charles stared at the menu, written in chalk on the blackboard above the counter, and decided it would be too much to order the ham and egg platter, but he simply couldn’t survive on a kale smoothie. Also, he was going to pretend he’d forgotten his wallet. The shame would strike later. Right now, he was simply so relieved he could eat today that his stomach was applauding.

“French toast and sausage, with the fruit cup,” Charles said, and then pretended to be dismayed when he slapped his pockets. Fortunately, his cardigan was long enough to cover the bulge of his wallet in his back pocket. “Erik, so sorry, but I’ve forgotten my wallet.”

“Oh, sure.” Erik handed over his debit card while Charles promised to pay him back. “Don’t worry about it.”

“I really will pay you back,” Charles insisted. The shame was creeping up on him already, a double helping because he could sense that Erik was actually happy about the fact that he got to buy Charles breakfast and he felt terrible about lying to someone like that.

Erik shrugged, grabbed a napkin and found them a table, setting down his manila folder. 

Charles sat down with his tray and forced himself to eat at a normal pace. 

“We’ve missed the appeal time period,” Erik said.

Charles wondered if he was supposed to know what that meant. What were they appealing? Did he dare ask? Or would he look stupid? Fishing specific information out of people's heads was forbidden by the Casey-Kenton Standards for the Ethical Use of Telepathy. He should ask the question verbally, or keep quiet and hope Erik would keep talking and give him more clues about what they were talking about. 

“Logan should have come to us three years ago when the pension checks stopped coming. He only had one year to appeal, and obviously we’ve missed the window by two years,” Erik said.

Charles swallowed a mouthful of French toast and washed it down with coffee. “You mean he hasn’t gotten his pension in three years and he didn’t notice?”

Erik gave an affirmative shrug. Charles had never seen someone do that before. “People like Logan have a safety net. He probably filled in the missing money that way, and only came to us once the safety net stopped working.”

“Safety net?”

“Yeah, you know. The network of people that help you out when times get hard. He already told us part of it, remember? He said the trailer park manager lets him trade work for lot rental. I bet he’s gotten cash from some odd jobs here and there. He’s probably got some friends who feed him in exchange for work too, and there’s a lot of bartering that goes on once you get down to that economic rung. Folks like him have dozens of other folks like him in their network. You pay it back, you pay it forward,” Erik said.

This was the longest speech he had ever heard from Erik, and it was fascinating. Imagine a whole group of people you could turn to when you needed food or money, and it worked well enough you could go three years without a pension check. That sounded like real riches to Charles.

“And Logan wouldn’t need health insurance.” Erik’s cheek twitched, and Charles recognized that might have been a smile because Erik had just said something faintly humorous. Erik’s smiles were rare, which made them noteworthy. 

“He’d have to pay the penalty for not having it,” Charles said.

“What did you find out about his pension for his service in Korea, Vietnam or the Persian Gulf?”

They had divided up the project. Erik was to chase down why the World War II pension had stopped coming, and Charles was to find out why the pensions for Korea, Vietnam and the Persian Gulf had never started coming at all.

“A problem with his documentation. They don’t have proof he’s an American citizen,” Charles said, spearing a bite of sausage with honeydew melon. The sweet and salty combination was delicious.

“He served in the military, and they don’t know if he’s an American? That sounds like their error, not ours,” Erik observed. “And he was getting a World War II pension. What more proof do they need?”

“It did sound a bit sloppy on their part,” Charles agreed, pouring another packet of sugar into his coffee and taking a sip. “But if we could send them a birth certificate or a citizenship certificate, it might clear up the issue.”

“Might be hard to find a birth certificate for someone born in 1830.”

Charles set down his coffee cup and bumped his fork off the table. Before it could hit the floor, it was suspended in mid-air, and then floated back up to the table. Erik had a couple of fingers outstretched, and Charles could feel that low-pitched mental tingle that marked the use of mutant power. He’d rarely spent time with mutants before coming to Avalon, other than Raven, and it thrilled him to see a mutant use his power.

“You’re telekinetic. I saw it on the firm’s website,” Charles said.

Erik shrugged. 

“You know, when my mutation manifested, I thought I was going crazy. I kept hearing voices in my head that weren’t mine. It scared me,” Charles confided. 

Erik stirred the last remaining inch of his kale smoothie before drinking it. “I thought we had a poltergeist in our house. Stuff kept following me around.”

A wide grin split Charles’ face. Of course he’d read about how many mutants were distressed and confused when their powers first manifested in their early teens, but it was so reassuring to hear one of those stories in person. 

“My mom figured it out before I did. She was so great about everything,” Erik continued.

Charles had a hard time swallowing the food he’d just put in his mouth because his throat tightened up at that. “That’s neat your mom was so helpful.”

“Well, yeah, she’s my mom,” Erik said with a laugh, like of course a mom would be helpful.

A teenager with a big backpack brushed against their table and knocked Erik’s manila folder onto the floor. Papers scattered. “Dude, sorry!” he said, and bent down to help Erik pick up the papers. 

“Don’t worry about it,” Erik replied, straightening the stack before slipping them all back into the folder. The teenager apologized again before leaving with his breakfast burrito.

“Why didn’t you catch the folder too?” Charles asked curiously.

Erik shrugged. “Some things are easier to move than others.” For some reason, Erik’s mental shields abruptly snapped into place at that comment. Then he stood up and threw away his cup.

Erik must have a fairly weak and unpredictable mutation, but that was no cause for embarrassment. Charles wolfed down the last of his fruit, slurped his coffee, cleared his dishes and called out for Erik to wait a minute, since it looked like he was just going to abandon Charles in the cafe.

They traded stories about embarrassing moments caused by their mutations on the walk to work. When they got to the side entrance, Charles pulled out his wallet to tap his security card. 

“I thought you forgot your wallet,” Erik said.

Oh, damn. And now he needed a quick lie. His mind blanked out, and he realized he didn’t want to lie to Erik. He also didn’t want to get into a long explanation of the desperate financial straits he was in. “I didn’t forget my wallet. I just . . . needed you to pay for breakfast.”

“Okay, that’s fine. Do you want me to buy you breakfast tomorrow too?”

Charles looked at Erik in confusion, but he was completely serious. He’d taken Charles’ explanation at face value, didn’t pry into the reasons, and wanted to see if he could help further. Erik’s mental shields had relaxed again during the walk back to the office, and that was really all he was feeling. Erik’s lack of social skills apparently eased some situations that should have been embarrassing.

“You know what? That would be great.”

“Same time? Same place?”

“Yes. I promise to pay you back as soon as I can.”

Erik put a hand out to stop Charles from going through the door. “I have to tell you something so you don’t think I’m uncomfortable around you.”

Charles was getting used to how direct Erik was. “Go ahead.”

“I don’t have a problem with being around telepaths, and I wouldn’t usually shield. But some stuff has happened at the office. I shield around Frost, not you.”

“It’s fine, Erik, lots of people are uncomfortable around telepaths. I keep shields up too, to avoid hearing things I don’t want to hear.” The door began buzzing because they’d held it open too long, so Charles let it shut.

“It’s not you I’m uncomfortable around, it’s Frost, and it’s because of stuff she’s done, not that she’s a telepath.”

“Okay, Erik.”

“Okay.”

Charles tapped the security card again and they went inside, thinking that the more he got used to Erik, the more he liked this direct style of communication. Life with his mother was all mind games and manipulation, avoiding the danger of ever saying what you really meant. As they entered the building, Charles felt Erik’s mental shields go up. 

“Charles?”

“Hmm?”

“Thanks for talking to me.”

Erik said that like Charles had done him a favor. “I like talking to you, Erik.” There, Charles could be just as direct as Erik.

“You do?”

“Yes. Who wouldn’t want to talk to you?”

“Do you really want me to answer that?”

Charles laughed, but then later he wondered if Erik had meant to be funny or not.

* * *

If you could send a government office enough stuff in writing, they would generally do what you wanted them to do. That meant he and Charles needed to get more documents from Logan, like proof of citizenship, and the certificates about his wartime service, details about any awards he might have won, information about his deployments, that sort of thing. Erik frowned at the computer screen, where he’d pulled up the pension information on the military website and wondered why the military didn’t already have all of this information on Logan. The military loved paperwork even more than the IRS did. How did they not require all this documentation in triplicate before they ever handed Logan a gun?

“Hello, Erik.” The voice was cool and crisp, like Emma herself.

“Hi, Emma,” Erik replied without looking away from his computer screen.

“What are you working on?”

“My pro bono case.”

“Then you’ve got time to research this issue for me.” It wasn't a question.

There are the people who wrong you. Then there are the people who could have set things right and chose not to. After the #MeToo movement gained traction and resulted in bar meetings about sexual harassment, the resignation of a circuit court judge, and the hasty retirements of several prominent attorneys, Erik had told Emma Frost about the things Sebastian Shaw had said to him, the two times he’d groped him, and then that forcible kiss in Shaw's office the night Sebastian asked Erik to work late with him. He’d kept his mental shields down, though the conversation left him feeling naked, and told her she could check his memories. She did. Then she told him Sebastian was straight, and Erik must have misinterpreted things. That was how Erik found out that Sebastian and Emma were dating. That was also how he found out that #BelieveWomen didn’t yet include believing gay men. Gay rights tended to trail women’s rights by a few decades.

With a woman to speak up in his defense, Sebastian Shaw was untouchable. Janos, who had heard some of Sebastian’s inappropriate comments to Erik, developed selective amnesia. Stricken with humiliation, Erik had sent out his resume to the other law firms in Avalon, but hadn’t been able to find another job.

All of this meant Erik was even more agitated around Emma Frost than he was around Sebastian Shaw. She looked so proper and good, with her perfectly pink lips, sculpted blonde curls and oval face. Erik had loved Disney princess movies as a child, and it was a nasty shock to realize that someone who looked like the princess was actually the wicked witch.

Erik picked up a paperclip in his left hand and a pen in his right. “What issue?” He reshaped the paperclip to have more ridges, rough against the pad of his thumb.

“I need a definition of the ‘reasonable person’ standard in rural medical care, and if Pennsylvania differs from neighboring jurisdictions. There’s a line of cases differentiating between the expected standards in rural medical situations and urban situations. The insurance company is arguing that their doctor meets the standards for a rural practice, and of course we need to hold him to the real standards.”

Erik took notes. “Okay. When do you need it?”

“Monday morning.”

It was Friday afternoon right now. “Fine.”

Emma didn’t leave his office, even though the conversation was over and Erik was looking at his computer screen again.

“Erik?” Emma pulled the chair opposite Erik’s desk up close, and set her elbow on his desk, with her chin resting delicately on her manicured hand. “Are you doing alright? You’re not still feeling upset about . . . things, are you?”

Erik hated this. Of course he was upset, but he couldn’t say so. The situation confused him and he didn’t know how to respond. He wanted Emma Frost to leave, so he picked an answer that would make her go away. “No, I’m fine.”

“Because we do insist on treating everyone with respect at Frost & Shaw, and I wouldn’t want to have anyone thinking we don’t keep to the highest standards. It’s just that not everything that makes us uncomfortable is deliberate. Some things really do get misinterpreted.”

She wanted him to say Shaw never did anything wrong. She wanted him to say that he was the one who had done something wrong by getting upset and reporting Shaw when it was all Erik’s fault for misinterpreting what had happened. The coverup, and the way the blame was getting reversed onto him, felt worse than what Shaw had done. Erik had read all those MeToo stories, and the women said the same thing about how the pain and confusion lingered so long because of the way the incidents were handled. What happened afterwards hurt even more than what happened.

“I know what I know, Emma. I’m not going to say it didn’t happen,” Erik said doggedly, still staring at his computer screen. The thing was, he was beginning to think it hadn’t happened, or at least not the way he remembered it. Erik knew he misread social cues and had awkward moments; if something went wrong, it was usually Erik’s fault. It had been that way since childhood. When someone like Emma kept telling him he was wrong, he started thinking she was right. It was hard to disbelieve someone so graceful, poised and sure. If she said it again, he might agree with her.

“Thank you for your help with the research,” she said in clipped tones, and walked out of his office, leaving behind an emotional miasma of blame that undercut Erik’s confidence further.

Erik stopped pretending to type. It was 4:00 p.m. He usually worked until 6:00, but he didn’t want to be at the office anymore. Emma wanted her research done by Monday morning, and 11:59 a.m. would still be Monday morning. He was leaving for the day, and he was taking Charles with him. Charles was the antidote for every bad thing that had ever happened at Frost & Shaw. He craved Charles, the sound of his accent, the color of his mouth, the way he talked to Erik like he was worth talking to. 

“Charles?” Erik said with a light tap on Charles’ door.

Charles looked up at him with that bright smile. Charles smiled at almost everyone like that, but it didn’t stop Erik from melting a little bit every time Charles aimed that smile at him.

“We need to ask Logan about the documentation for his citizenship and military service. Do you want to drive out to his home with me?”

Charles was thrilled at the chance to go on a field trip. He hadn’t even been to a deposition yet, much less a court hearing. 

Erik was already at the elevator while Charles was telling Angel they were leaving early to go talk to a client and she should have a good weekend. Erik eyed Charles in his Italian suit. It made his shoulders look broad, tapered at his waist, and hugged that rounded ass so nicely, but Erik wasn’t thinking of how good Charles looked in that suit, or at least he wasn’t only thinking of that. “Do you want to change before we head out? We can stop by your apartment.”

“I am a bit overdressed for a visit to a trailer park, aren’t I?” 

Erik’s eyes crinkled up in a smile that didn’t reach his lips, but he didn’t say what he wanted to say. Another effect of what Shaw had done was to rob Erik of his ability to compliment someone.

* * *

  
  


“If you want to double park, I can just run up to my place. I won’t take a second,” Charles said, hoping that Erik would have to double park, or just circle the block, anything so he wouldn’t come upstairs with Charles.

Unfortunately, it turned out that Erik was excellent at parallel parking.

Charles opened the door even before Erik had turned off the engine. “If you want to wait, I’ll be right back.”

“Okay,” Erik agreed.

Now that he had made it clear that Erik should remain in the car, Charles got out and ran up the stairs to his apartment in good spirits. Eating regularly these past three days had done wonders for his mood. Even if he did only get breakfast, knowing when and where he would eat had lifted a lot of the strain that had been his constant companion since his mother had blow-torched his life. Sometimes he even felt normal again. The company helped too. Erik was serious, a little too direct, a bit clueless at times, and entirely likable. 

Charles unlocked his apartment and left the door slightly ajar in his hurry. His clothes were folded on the floor of the closet in the bedroom, stacked on plastic grocery bags to keep them off the scuffed hardwood floor. When he had enough money, he would buy blinds, though he still thought the landlord should have replaced them. As it was, he kept to the corner where he couldn’t be seen from the window as he stripped out of his suit and pulled on a pair of jeans and a pullover he’d gotten from New2You. He had four hangers, and he used three of them for his suit. Charles transferred his wallet to his jeans and was ready to go.

Footsteps entered his apartment and Charles froze when he heard Erik’s voice calling out, “hey, can I use your . . .” and then his voice fell silent. Charles walked to the door, his feet making echoes in the bare apartment. No carpet, no furniture, no tv, nothing on the walls. Shoulders hunched, Charles watched Erik look around. His expression was blank, his mental shields in place. Charles imagined what he might be thinking. 

“I’m using your bathroom,” Erik said.

At least there was a towel in the bathroom. It was an ugly shade of blue-green and most of the fuzz was worn off in the middle, but he did own a towel.

On his way out of the apartment, Erik detoured to the kitchen and opened the fridge. Even the eggs were gone now; Charles had turned off the fridge to save on the electric bill. Erik shut the fridge and left the apartment without looking at Charles. Charles followed slowly, stopping to turn the key in the lock.

By the time Charles got in the car, Erik was tapping at his phone, then he handed it to Charles. “Here. Order what you want.”

Charles took the phone. There was a menu on the screen. “What?”

“Order something and submit it. We’ll pick it up on our way,” Erik said. He started the car and pulled away from the curb.

Charles ordered a roast beef sandwich with horseradish mayonnaise, chips, a cookie and an iced tea and submitted the order. Erik still didn’t say anything. He just turned on NPR and they listened to a segment about a new education initiative in Ghana. Twenty silent minutes later, Erik picked up the sandwiches at Doolittle’s Deli. Charles’ hunger overwhelmed his tension as soon as he smelled his sandwich. Erik unwrapped his own turkey sandwich and ate it while they drove. 

He ate fast and the sandwich sat heavily in his stomach. He kept waiting for Erik to say something, and Erik kept staying quiet, and Charles couldn’t stand knowing there was something that ought to be said without saying it.

“I had a fight with my mother,” he blurted out. 

Erik’s eyebrows quirked enough to ask Charles to continue.

The entire story poured out, beginning with Charles deciding he needed to stand up to his mother, and ending with riding a Greyhound bus for six hours to Avalon, Pennsylvania just because he’d always wanted to live around other mutants.

“She took all your money?” Erik asked.

“It was all hers. Everything was always all hers. I wasn’t allowed to own anything.” Charles used to think his mother was generous to give him everything he needed; it was only after this happened that he realized that meant she controlled everything he had.

Erik’s mental shields had come down during Charles’ story, and Charles could sense confusion. That was better than pity, or that sneering ridicule that people sometimes aimed at the high and mighty when they were laid low. 

“My parents gave me everything I needed,” Erik said. “When I moved out, my mom stocked my kitchen with everything I needed to cook, then went shopping and filled my fridge. My dad bought me a kitchen table, and I got the bedroom furniture I’d used at home. The couches and stuff came from downstairs. Then every time I go home to visit, my mom asks what else I need and my dad gives me money whether I need it or not.”

If it was anyone else saying that, Charles would have thought they were gloating, but it was Erik and Charles could still sense confusion, only now it was beginning to mix with outrage. Erik kept talking, and the outrage was getting stronger and more defined until Charles understood that it was aimed at his mother. Erik was angry at Charles’ mother. He was listing everything his own parents had done for him because he was cataloguing all the things he hadn’t done for himself. In Erik’s own way, he was trying to reassure Charles that anyone would struggle if they’d been treated the way Sharon Marko had treated Charles. Kindness without gloating pity was not something Charles had ever experienced before. He was still basking in the warmth of it when Erik turned into Logan’s trailer park.

With the turn of Erik’s car, Charles’ perspective changed. His poverty was temporary, a bad memory on the way to easier times that he could tell stories about and claim some sort of kinship with people who struggled. But here were the people who genuinely struggled, and it wasn’t temporary. 

Erik pulled into the parking space by Logan’s trailer and shut off the engine. The two of them sat there for a minute, taking in the view of the neatly kept shed and painted porch railing. Logan’s trailer was in better repair than his neighbor’s. 

After several minutes of knocking on his door, the neighbor hollered, “He’s not home!”

Charles and Erik turned. The neighbor was an overweight woman in a spaghetti-strap tank top and cheap flip flops, out on the porch with a cigarette. Charles wondered if this was the neighbor who passed on phone messages when she wasn’t high.

In response to Erik’s question, the neighbor told them that Logan had a job today and would probably be back tonight.

“So I guess we come back in a couple of hours,” Erik said, pulling out of the trailer park.

A couple of hours to spend with Erik? What a happy thought. Erik didn’t ask for Charles’ input, and Charles was content to just ride along wherever Erik wanted to take him. They ended up at a mall.

“Come on,” Erik said, getting out of the car and expecting Charles to follow.

Charles took a few running steps to catch up to Erik’s long stride. It felt so natural to be at Erik’s side that he almost reached for his hand. He caught himself in time. Even with his mental shields down, Erik had strong privacy blocks around certain areas, like his sexuality and romantic history. Charles couldn’t tell if Erik was gay, which meant he should definitely not be trying to hold his hand. Charles didn’t have gaydar unless he was using telepathy or a guy was hitting on him. 

“Alright,” Erik said as he got the door for them and ushered Charles into the store, “I want you to think of this as an interest-free loan, but that’s only because I don’t want to offend you by offering charity.”

Erik was doing that thing again where he assumed Charles knew what he was talking about and Charles didn’t want to admit he had no clue. Instead, he looked around. They were in a men’s department store advertising a half-yearly sale. He suddenly felt very scruffy in his secondhand blue pullover with the frayed neckline.

“What size pants do you wear?” Erik asked while flipping through a rack of trousers. He turned and gave Charles a once-over that made him tingle.

“Can I help you gentlemen?” a sales associate asked.

“Yes,” Erik said, pulling out a knit top and holding it up to Charles, “we need his measurements, and then you can start us a room.”

“Certainly, sir,” the sales associate replied, and Charles found himself being walked into a dressing room where the sales associate, Jameson, got out a tape measure and did his best not to look appalled at what Charles was wearing.

About twenty minutes later, Charles was trying on clothes. Every few minutes, Erik handed him another something over the top of the door to the changing room, or told Jameson to find something in a different size. Charles couldn’t protest the shopping trip without Jameson hearing it all, though he was getting hot around the ears at the idea of Erik buying him a whole new wardrobe, which seemed to be Erik’s intention. The whole thing was making him deeply uneasy. Erik was feeding him, and now he was dressing him. It reminded him of the way his mother took over his daily needs, and then used it to control him. Erik must have an angle, but Charles couldn’t figure out what it was. The suspicion collided with how much Erik was enjoying it. There was an overwhelming sense of goodwill aimed at Charles whenever Erik was in emotional range, and it kept tripping him up when he meant to sternly insist that Erik stop doing this.

Charles stood in front of the three-way mirror while Jameson tugged at his cuffs and suggested trying a slightly longer sleeve size. Jameson was still in his teens, and had let slip this was only his second weekend on the job. Plus, he was about Charles’ size and Erik kept asking him what he would recommend and he was clearly having a great time chatting with Erik about what Charles should wear. Jameson and Erik were playing dress-ups with him, like he was one of Raven’s childhood dolls, the ones that weren't ninjas. It was impossible to get offended when they were having so much fun though. Flustered, yes, but not offended.

“What do you think of this neckline?” Erik asked Jameson, holding up a shirt that, to Charles, looked much the same as every other shirt he’d been trying on.

“I think a v-neck would lengthen the line more,” Jameson said, and Erik agreed like that comment made any sense.

“No turtlenecks?” Erik asked.

“Not for him, though I have to say you would look excellent in a turtleneck,” Jameson replied.

“Why not for me?” Charles asked, so he could participate in the conversation rather than just be the dress-up doll.

“Because I look better in them,” Erik said, his attention on the shirts he was sorting through. Then he walked out of the dressing room in search of another neckline or something else totally random like that.

Jameson watched him go, then whispered to Charles, “don’t tell my manager I said this, but your boyfriend is smoking hot.”

Charles blushed redder than the sweater he was wearing. “He’s not my boyfriend.”

“Really? But you’re so cute together! Oh, that’s a terrible color on you. Take it off.”

Charles took the sweater off, grinning like a fool.


	5. Collapse and Confession

Angel glared at the phone on her desk, which was beeping with a new call at 5:57 p.m. on a Friday. The chutzpah of some people. This wasn’t New York City. It was probably someone who thought a lawyer should work all weekend to file a complaint Monday morning. If a lawyer had to work all weekend, Angel had to work all weekend. Fortunately, she was an hourly employee, so she got time and a half for overtime, but she was going to an Emilie Sandé concert with Sean Cassidy this weekend. Angel was  _ not _ working this weekend, not even for double-time pay.

“Frost & Shaw, this is Angel. How may I help you?”

“Sebastian Shaw.”

Not a ‘please’ not a ‘I need to speak to’ not a single acknowledgment that the snooty woman on the line recognized that she was speaking to someone who had only answered the phone at 5:57 p.m. on a Friday out of the goodness of her heart. An apology for calling at that time was pretty much expected. That meant Angel could be just as snooty. “I believe he’s gone for the day. I’ll send you to his voice mail.”

“No you won’t. Don’t tell me your beliefs. Find him. Or give me his cell.”

The way administrative assistants got snootier was to get more polite. “Oh, I do apologize, ma’am. I’m not allowed to give out his cell number except for his most important clients. If you’d like to hold, I can confirm that he’s gone for the weekend. I believe he’s at a golf retreat next week, so it may be several days before he can get back to you.”

“Tell him Sharon is returning his call.” The entitlement in her voice bit back at Angel.

“Last name and case number?” Angel asked coolly. Only famous people got to go by one name only.

“Tell him Sharon is returning his call,” enunciating the words as if Angel was slow.

Angel put Sharon on hold without another word. She knew Shaw was in Frost’s office, so she walked down the hall instead of using the intercom. Angel waited patiently for a break in their conversation because Sharon deserved to spend a long time on hold.

“Someone named Sharon says she’s returning your call,” Angel informed Shaw when he looked at her.

In spite of the constant creepy smiles, Shaw never actually looked happy. He looked gleeful, but it was the sort of gleeful that made you hope it had nothing to do with you. “Transfer the call to my office.”

Angel walked back to her desk. She retrieved the call from hold, and sent Sharon to Shaw’s line without any of her customary phone manners, which were outstanding. She was getting out of here before Shaw could ask her to work on something for Sharon.

She clocked out at 6:08 p.m.

* * *

Erik pulled back into Logan’s trailer park, the trunk of his Mazda Miata full of the shopping spree while Charles kept protesting.

“I told you, it’s not charity and it’s not a gift, so quit with the offended pride thing. You’ve got twelve months to pay me back, no interest. And if you give me a penny before you've bought furniture, I will hurt you,” Erik said flatly.

Charles gave up arguing. “With loan terms like that, you could never get a job at Pinch & Stiff Bank.”

“I hope not; they’re sharks. I had a client get hounded into bankruptcy by them. He had to sign a contract with a dragnet clause just to open a bank account and get a credit card and then he missed his first payment and it was all over just that fast,” Erik said.

“What’s a dragnet clause?” Charles asked, but Erik was already getting out of the car.

Logan was home now, and he invited them into a trailer with farmstead style flooring, textured walls and crown molding. The classy decorating was confined to the walls and floor. The place smelled like cigar smoke and was furnished cheaply. The couch had a blanket and pillow on it, made up as a bed, which Logan yanked out of the way so they could sit down. Erik explained that the appeal period had expired on the World War II pension and told him they needed documents about Logan’s citizenship and military service to get the pension for the Korean and Vietnam wars. Logan took the unlit cigar out of his mouth to frown at them.

“I was Black Ops in those wars. There aren’t any records. Officially, I never fought.”

Erik blinked. That was going to make things difficult.

“You must have a contact,” said Charles. “Someone gave you orders. How do we contact them?”

“Black Ops,” Logan repeated. “It’s classified. I could tell you, but then I’d have to kill you. Shit like that.”

“So there is someone, but you can’t tell us?” Erik clarified.

“Beats me. I haven’t heard from any of them for thirty years. Once that treaty got signed and mutants couldn’t fight anymore, I got kicked to the curb. They probably wouldn’t care even if I did get in touch with them,” Logan said.

“That’s so unfair!” Charles burst out.

Logan looked at Charles like a kitten had just wandered into his trailer.

“Can you tell us anything at all without telling us something classified?”

“Yeah, I can give you the name of an office in the Pentagon and the name of a guy who used to work there. I don’t think you’ll get very far, but it’s something.” Logan got up to find a paper and pen.

“Also, any of your serial numbers, rank, the name you were using, dates of service, branch of the military. Basic information can’t be classified,” Erik said.

“I guess you’re right about that.” Logan filled a page with information. “My code name might get a reaction.”

“Are you doing alright in the meantime?” Charles asked when Logan handed the paper to Erik.

Logan shrugged. “Work comes up sometimes. I get by. I always get by.” He had a wry, warm smile that seemed sincere, even when combined with the tired look in his eyes. “I got a friend staying with me right now, and she found a job last week, so that’ll keep the electricity on anyway.”

“She ought to be paying half the rent,” Charles bristled.

“She’s worse off than I am,” Logan answered. “She ran away from home when her mutation caused problems. I picked her up hitchhiking before some creep could get to her. Hey, you guys had dinner? I got potatoes and sausage.”

“We’re fine,” Charles said. 

“Does your girlfriend,” Erik started, but Logan cut him off.

“She’s not a girlfriend! I’m no pedophile! She’s just a kid, no older than him,” Logan pointed at Charles, “like sixteen or something.”

“I’m twenty-three!” Charles sputtered indignantly.

“Yeah, that’s pretty close,” Logan said.

From the point of view of someone who was nearly two hundred years old, there probably wasn’t much difference between sixteen and twenty-three. Erik smothered a smile at Charles’ indignation. Charles looked younger than he was. Erik was thirty, but could pass for thirty-five, which was an advantage as a lawyer. Then he did the math and realized that Charles was younger than he was supposed to be. “How did you start law school when you were twenty? You had a double major in college; you couldn’t have graduated early.”

“Oh, I um, started college when I was sixteen,” Charles admitted.

“You one of those genius kids?” Logan asked.

“It got me out of the house that much sooner,” Charles explained.

“Huh, so you ran away from home too.” Logan had that wry, warm smile again. “Me too, actually, took off pretty young.” The smile faded and his eyes looked two hundred years old.

Erik looked between the two of them and felt vaguely guilty that his parents loved him so much.

The door to the trailer opened and someone said, “Hi, Logan,” before she even came through the door. Then she stopped dead.

“It’s alright, Marie. These guys are the lawyers who are helping with my pension,” Logan said, and Marie relaxed.

“I’m not used to thinking lawyers are good guys,” she said with a rural accent and a small smile perched uncertainly on rosebud lips.

Charles stepped in to be charming and cement their reputation as good guys. Erik liked the way Marie rolled sounds around and softened them when she spoke. It made a pleasing contrast with Charles’ crisp English accent. Within a very few minutes, Marie was sitting next to Charles on the couch and telling him the whole story of why she ran away from home.

“What exactly can you do with your mutation?” Charles asked.

“I don’t know. I just know that when I touch people, they get hurt. It’s not like I can experiment with it, you know,” Marie said with an apologetic shrug. She kept hunching her shoulders. Her long gloves disappeared into the sleeves of her shirt, and her blouse had a high collar.

“You can say no,” Charles said, “but if you want my help, I may be able to sort out a bit of what you can do. I’m a telepath, you see.”

That drew an exclamation of surprise from Logan, and then he turned to Erik. “What about you?”

“Telekinetic,” Erik said shortly, then turned the conversation back to Charles to shut down any further questions. “Charles wouldn’t pry into any other areas, Marie, he’d just look at your mutation.” Slowly, hoping Charles was paying too much attention to Marie to notice what he was doing, Erik put up every mental shield he could manage, and then reinforced privacy blocks around everything to do with his mutation. 

“You could see how powerful it is? I’ve only ever hurt people so far, but I’m so scared I could actually kill someone. Could you see that? Could you see if I could kill people?” Marie asked.

“Marie, any of us could kill people,” Logan said.

“Not just by touching them,” Marie said.

With a metallic  _ snick, _ Logan sprang twelve-inch metal claws out of his fists. “Yeah, actually, I can kill people just by touching them.”

It was dark humor, but it still made Marie laugh in a way that was halfway to crying. Charles blinked, and slowly sat back down after he’d jumped up in shock. Erik unconsciously leaned towards Logan, fingers reaching towards that metal resonating with strength and tension, the molecules lined up so tightly and perfectly that he ached to feel it respond to his power, sculpt it, mold it, move it, caress it like the treasure it was. The metal wasn’t earthly, and it drew him the way stars drew astronomers and beauty drew artists. He couldn’t resist running a whisper of his power over those claws, just the smallest vibration to tease a connection between himself and this unearthly substance. The sensation was like giving a starving man one bite of a feast and then expecting him to stop. Despite his efforts to stop himself, Erik’s fingers came to rest on one of Logan’s claws, and just the awareness of it on his fingertips thrilled him to his center.

“What is it?”

“Adamantium,” Logan said. “Came from a meteor.”

“How did your mutation put adamantium from a meteor inside your hands?” Charles asked.

Logan barked out a laugh. “My mutation made me survive when the military injected my entire skeleton with it.”

“But that’s . . .”

“. . . mutant experimentation,” Logan finished for him. “Yeah. Happened a lot back in the day. Been there, done that. Sure was hell.”

“And now they won’t even give you a pension?” Erik had never been so outraged in his entire life. He would storm the Pentagon if necessary, but he’d be damned if he would let the U.S. government get away with cutting off Logan’s pension after what they’d done to him.

With that smooth metallic  _ snick, _ Logan’s claws retracted. “There’s a lot of injustice in this world, Erik.”

“I’m not old enough to be philosophical about it yet,” Erik said angrily.

Logan gave him a measuring look. “Good.”

The conversation paused and Erik had time to let go of the pipes in the walls and set the pots in the kitchen back down softly enough to not make any noise. Injustice clawed at his insides and tore him up more than anything else, which was how he’d ended up in law school. Well, that and the fact that if he’d studied metallurgy, he risked exposing what he could really do. Perhaps the reason Erik was so furious about the injustice visited upon others is because he couldn’t do anything about the injustice he lived with every day. He could fix it for Logan, and that thought calmed him down. 

“We were talking about your friend here helping Marie,” Logan reminded him.

“You can’t touch my skin,” Marie said to Charles.

“I don’t need to touch you at all. Do you want me to look, then?” Charles asked.

At Marie’s nod, Charles explained what would happen. “I’m going to check in with the areas of your mind that involve your mutation. I’ll keep away from anything you have privacy blocks around. Just think you don’t want me to know about something, and I won’t. I’ll stay to your memories of the time you’ve used your power, and then I’m going to dive in and explore the areas of your mind that control your power. If you want me to stop, just think ‘get out’ at me, and I’ll pull back immediately.”

Marie nodded again, her eyes full of guarded hope, and she flashed a brief smile at Logan. Logan sat down next to her on the couch and put a hand on her shoulder. 

Charles sat forward on the chair and put two fingers to his temple. “Starting now, Marie, do you feel me coming into your mind? Softly, I can back out if you need time to get used to the sensation. There, it’s right there, a memory of when your power affected someone else. Mm-hmm, I see what happened. Are there other memories? Let me see. Gently. If this makes you uncomfortable . . . no? . . . alright, we’ll keep going. I can see other times, going back to when you were about twelve or thirteen. That’s the normal age for mutation to manifest. Before then, you’re right, I don’t see any other memories of your power affecting anyone else. Now I’m going to shift from your memory centers into the conscious thought areas of your brain. Did you know that control of our mutations is physiologically located in the same area of the brain responsible for processing touch? It’s not a sixth sense, but there is the same loop we use for touch, where we control what we’re doing, and have to process the input at the same time. Can you feel the sense of my mind in that area now? I’m trying not to take any sudden moves. I want you to know I’m in here and exactly what I’m doing.”

Erik’s eyes briefly met Logan’s, a check-in to see if he was experiencing the same thing. Charles’ power was overflowing, gathering around Erik’s mind and giving him glimpses of Marie that he ought not to be having.

Charles continued his narration. “It’s a remarkable power, Marie. Do you know, I think it’s related to telepathy. You’ve got an ability to connect with people, to draw on their essence rather than their thoughts. There must be a way to control it though, mental shielding like telepaths use may be of some use. The harm comes when the connection runs too deep; your mutation doesn’t cause any damage until the connection deepens. Wait, what is it here? That’s strange. There’s a sense of . . . Marie . . . that connection . . . can you . . . let go . . . Marie! Let go!”

“Get out!” Marie began screaming as Charles crumpled, his face drying like parchment, blood vessels turning black under his skin like the blood had turned to poison, gasping as his lungs forgot how to breathe. Erik felt a hook beneath his skin, yanking on everything at once. Logan shouted an exclamation and leaped up, shaking his head. The hook snapped as Charles slumped over.

Marie ran from the trailer, Logan right behind her but not trying to stop her.

Erik grabbed Charles by the shoulders and shook him; his face continued to buckle inward as his life essence followed Marie out of the trailer.

“Charles!”

* * *

Erik shut and locked his apartment door behind him using his power. His arms were full of a barely-conscious Charles, and he relaxed the magnetic levitation he’d used to carry him. His skin was back to normal; his breathing was even; he shook like a butterfly in the wind. The trembling matched the terror inside Erik, the fear that Charles might have died, taking Erik’s fragile daydream with him. 

Charles hadn’t even made a token protest when Erik simply picked him up and carried him out of Logan’s trailer and buckled him into his Mazda, wishing there was an emergency room that could help a telepath. He’d run back in and scrawled “Charles will be okay” on a scrap of paper and left it on the chair where Charles had been sitting, then took Charles home.

With a flick of his power, Erik turned on the lights. Charles responded by turning his head further into Erik’s neck, his hand tightening on Erik’s arm. Erik barely restrained himself from pressing a kiss against Charles’ hair; his whole body aching with the need to reassure Charles that he would never let anything hurt him, ever again. He flicked off the living room light, leaving only the kitchen light. He sat down in the recliner and summoned the fleece blanket that had the metal weights sewn into it, tucking it tightly around Charles, careful to keep his mental shields up to conceal how he was savoring Charles, the feel of that compact body pressed in close, his head on Erik’s shoulder. The last thing Charles needed right now was to deal with anyone else craving his life essence.

Erik was a train wreck when it came to romantic relationships. Sex was easy. He just walked into a gay bar, picked out a guy, made eye contact, and the other guy took over. Or he got on Grindr and swiped right. That was always a match. If anyone had ever swiped left on Erik’s profile, he hadn’t run across him yet. But whenever he tried to date someone, like have a relationship outside of the bedroom, it ended within a couple months when the guy said a bunch of things like, ‘I can’t explain it to you, it’s just not working for me,’ and ‘dude, you’re weird.’ As much as Erik liked sex, he was sick of hook-ups. He wanted a boyfriend. He’d call his mom after yet another insta-breakup, and she would tell him he just hadn’t met the right man yet. So he tried talking to Magda to get some useful advice. She told him to be friends with someone for at least a few months before having sex. That way he could find out if the guy liked Erik as a person, not just as a pickup.

That turned out to be harder than it was supposed to be. Everyone he met wanted to have sex with him. Like one pickup told him: it’s not like anyone wanted to be with him for the conversation. Then he’d met Charles. There was no option but friendship, since he was Charles’ supervisor and he sure as hell wouldn’t treat Charles the way Shaw treated him. Plus, since Charles didn’t know that Erik was falling in love with him, he couldn’t break up with him. 

Several minutes passed, and the tension in Charles’ body didn’t relax at all. “Erik? Are you shielding?”

“Yes.”

“Could you drop your shields? Please?”

Well . . . this was going to lead to an awkward conversation because his mind was saturated with the desire and thrill of having Charles fitted against him so tightly, but Charles had asked, so . . . Erik took a deep breath and dropped his mental shielding. “Done.”

Charles sucked in a breath and sat up abruptly, pushing away from Erik’s chest. “They’re down? Are you sure? You’re not shielding?”

“I’m not shielding.” 

Charles shuddered and then let himself fall back to Erik’s chest. “I’m psi-blind. I could feel Marie’s power latching onto mine. She took it, Erik. She took my power! I can’t sense anything at all from your mind!”

Erik refused to be relieved when Charles was so obviously upset. 

“I can’t sense you, I can’t sense your neighbors, and I can hardly tell where I am right now! This can’t be happening! What do I do?!”

Erik pulled the blanket back up to Charles’ shoulders, hoping to calm him.

“What are you doing?” Charles shouted at him, shoving himself off Erik’s lap. “I’m not five years old! You’re treating me like a child! You buy me food, you buy me clothes, and now you’re carrying me around and tucking me in. I’m not a child, Erik!” Charles staggered back a few steps until he ran into the couch and collapsed on it, shaking so hard it was visible. 

Erik didn’t dare offer him the blanket. “I’m . . . sorry.”

“What’s your angle anyway? Why are you being so nice to me? Do you want something? Are you going to ask me for money? You already know I’ve got nothing. What are you doing, Erik?!”

Erik’s hands tightened on the fleece blanket until the metal weights in it curved into his palms. He’d done something wrong. Erik had once explained to Magda the difference between fear and anxiety. Fear was worrying that something bad would happen to him; anxiety was worrying that he was the one who would do something bad. Once his anxiety kicked in, his brain tied itself in knots, and he usually caused the thing he worried about the most. Fuck it and damn, he was going to screw things up with Charles. His jaw clenched, and he looked anywhere except at Charles. 

“Take me home,” Charles said, and his voice was cold.

Back to that empty apartment, to leave him there alone, an hour after Erik thought Charles might be dying. But Charles had asked.

“I’ll take you home. Just a second.” He needed a minute to calm down. His medication was wearing off now that it was evening, and calming down was always harder once his meds wore off. Erik went to the kitchen and picked up one of the palm-sized flannel bags full of ball bearings that his mom had made for him and rubbed it between both hands.

When Erik was calm enough to go back into the living room, Charles was looking around. If Erik had known Charles was coming over, he would have removed some of the lists from the bulletin board. Erik had lists, and then lists of lists. It kept him focused when he was away from the office and the structure of billable hours that helped him stay on task. The kitchen table was covered with the 4,000 piece Lego Death Star he kept building, taking apart, and building again. There were bowls of paper clips on the end tables.

“Erik, I’m sorry for overreacting just now. I’m very badly rattled by this encounter with Marie. You’ve done nothing but be kind, and I’m afraid I don’t know how to handle kindness very well. It would make more sense to me if you hung me out to dry.”

Charles was talking to him again. Did this mean they were friends? Could Erik say something? If he said the wrong thing, would Charles yell again? How could someone not know how to handle kindness? What the hell was he supposed to do now? Brain in knots, yes, that was still a problem. “Do you still want me to take you home?”

“I get dizzy when I stand up. I hate to impose after yelling at you for trying to take care of me.” Charles shrugged and looked at the floor.

What did that mean? Did he want to go home or not? Charles hadn’t answered the question. If he asked again, would Charles think he was playing dumb? Sometimes if Erik asked as many questions as he needed to ask, the neurotypical person got mad at him. Erik held out a hand and paperclips filled it.

“You like paperclips,” Charles said with half a smile.

“Yeah.” Agreeing wouldn’t make Charles mad again, would it?

“You can come sit down again, Erik.”

Erik crossed the room and sat down in the recliner. If Charles wanted him to sit down, that meant he didn’t want Erik to take him home, right? There were too many variables in this conversation. The paperclips coalesced out into a worry stone with ridges because Erik liked texture.

“I shouldn’t have yelled at you. I’m sorry.”

Eye contact. He was supposed to make eye contact, even though that ratcheted his anxiety up by a factor of ten. If Charles wasn’t going to yell anymore, maybe Erik could tell him what the fuck was going on. Magda had told him to explain to his next boyfriend why relationships were hard for him and talk things out early on. That suggestion frustrated Erik, because he didn’t think anyone noticed that he was different anymore. But it seemed that it was the best way to apologize to Charles. “I have ADHD.”

“Beg pardon?”

“I have ADHD. I sometimes don’t filter and respond to social cues very well.”

“I . . . thought ADHD meant kids have too much energy,” Charles said.

Erik extruded the worry stone back into strings of metal and twisted them around his fingers. “We don’t. We just can’t connect with whatever it is we’re supposed to be doing so we keep trying to find something else to do. We’re looking for something we connect with long enough to hold our attention, not burning off extra energy.”

“Oh.”

Was that an interested ‘oh’? Had he freaked out Charles? Was he making a fool of himself? What should he say? Should he wait for Charles to say something? If he started talking, would he say too much and bore Charles? Erik did that a lot. If he thought something was interesting, he talked it to death. 

“I didn’t mean to do too much to help you. I try to help people, but I don’t always do it right. I’m sorry I did too much,” Erik said. He made himself stop talking.

“Oh, Erik.” Charles’ voice was soft now, and so were his eyes. Erik wanted to memorize that expression and hold it as close as paper clips. 

They talked after that. Erik explained more about growing up with ADHD and the way it affected his interactions with people. Charles admitted he was hypersensitive about how needy he was right now. Erik tried to reassure him by saying anyone would need lots of help if their mother threw them away, but that didn’t go over very well and he ended up apologizing again. He settled for offering to take back the clothes he’d bought, and Charles said to just take back some of them, and they would sort them out in the morning. 

Charles slept on Erik’s couch that night. It was a good thing his telepathy was gone, because Erik couldn’t keep himself from wanting Charles that night, wanting the arch of that pale body under his, wanting to hear the sounds he would make when Erik brought him to orgasm, wanting to know the taste of his skin and the feel of his hair twisted around Erik’s fingers. He wanted Charles so badly, and the desire tangled up in the fear that he would ruin everything until he couldn’t tell the difference between hope and pain. 

* * *

Charles took his bowl of cereal and sat down at the table, moving Lego pieces out of his way. He was wearing Erik’s t-shirt and sweats, and had a serious case of bedhead. The lack of telepathy still made him dizzy, but he could walk across the room if he moved slowly. 

“Is it alright if I sit by you?” Erik asked.

“Yes, of course, sit down,” Charles said, bemused at Erik asking permission to sit at his own table. He didn’t need telepathy to see how badly he’d rattled Erik when he’d yelled at him last night. Only part of Charles’ outburst had been triggered by the loss of his telepathy. The rest of it was the fear that Erik was doing too much for him. His mother had done everything for him; he’d let her, not noticing the total control until she’d used it to destroy his life. Charles couldn’t figure out Erik’s motive for taking over his life, and he’d gotten scared enough to get angry. Erik’s explanation of ADHD caught him completely off guard, which shows how little telepaths understand the minds of anyone around them. 

Charles had plenty of friends who claimed to have ADHD, but they usually meant it as a joke to explain why they blew off their homework or played video games too much. Erik’s version had been diagnosed by licensed child psychologists and resulted in a litany of social skills classes, occupational therapy, accommodations at school, then switching schools to find a place that could accommodate a child with ADHD who tested above average in every category of intelligence, individual therapy to help him deal with the social anxiety and general anxiety that went hand in hand with ADHD, and a whole battery of tests and evaluations to decide whether or not he was on the autism spectrum. He wasn’t, but he was close in some areas.

“Would you please not tell anyone at the office about my diagnosis?” Erik asked. “They don’t know. I act normal enough now that I don’t have to explain things anymore, and some people get weird if they find out you have a label.”

Charles put a spoonful of Corn Pops in his mouth. He’d noticed Erik’s lack of social skills the first day, and he’d overheard some snide comments about Erik’s awkward behavior from some of the other attorneys, plus Shaw constantly warning him that Erik could be hard to work with. “Sure, Erik, I won’t tell anyone.” In fact, he just might kill anyone who mocked Erik’s efforts to fit in ever again.

“You know, I always wondered if being a telepath would make things easier,” Erik mused.

“Beg pardon?”

“If I was a telepath, I would know what people were thinking and how I should respond. I have to guess a lot, and I get it wrong pretty often.”

Charles chuckled at that. “Telepathy doesn’t make it any easier. Harder, I would say.”

“But you know what people are thinking!”

Charles finished his cereal and leaned back in the chair. “First off, once you get pegged as a telepath, everything is about how to  _ not _ use your power. The Casey-Kenton Standards for the Ethical Use of Telepathy can be summed up by saying you should try your best to not be telepathic at all. Mostly I can pick up strongly projected thoughts before they’re spoken, but since people are about to speak them anyway, I just know a second or two in advance what they were going to say. I can pick up emotional moods, but most people can glean moods from facial expressions, so telepathy means I’m pretty bad at reading people through baseline methods.”

Erik started laughing at that. “You want to know how I learned to read moods? I had this therapist when I was about thirteen who made me watch Pixar movies with her. She’d pause the movie and we’d talk about what the characters were feeling and how I could tell. I learned everything I know about passive-aggressive behavior from Marlin in  _ Finding Dory, _ because Dory drove him crazy and he hated that he had to pretend to like her so she would help him.”

“You what?”

“Pixar movies, seriously. Once I explained everything Wall-E was feeling, my therapist gave me a certificate and said if I could read robot moods, I could handle middle school.”

The sight of Erik laughing hooked in somewhere behind his heart and pulled, sending a thrill of mingled fondness and fear through him. “What about  _ Inside Out?” _

“That movie is solid gold,” Erik said. “I finally had a list of basic emotions and ways to visualize them, especially when they argue with each other. I added one to my own head though. I’ve got Anxiety, and he’s Fear’s twin brother.”

They spent the next hour talking about Pixar movies and emotional nuances while working on Erik’s Lego set. Erik was surprisingly articulate about emotions, moods and how to discern what people were feeling and Charles told him so.

“Yeah, I speak the language, but it’s always going to be a second language,” Erik said with a shrug. “Do you speak a second language?”

“French. I studied it in high school, and spent a semester in Paris.”

“I speak German because my dad taught me. I thought I was super fluent because I understood everything my dad said, and he understood everything I said. Then I tried to hang out with a group of native speakers who weren’t slowing down and simplifying everything for me. They got to talking so fast I could barely pick out a word once in a while. I can communicate in German, but I’m not fluent like a native speaker.”

Charles nodded. He considered himself conversationally fluent in French, but that meant he could carry on a conversation with people who understood his accent and slowed down enough for him to follow what they were saying. 

“Neurotypical is a second language for me, and I speak it with an ADHD accent,” Erik said. “I do fine with one or two people who know me, and understand my accent. But I still get lost if I’m in a big group of neurotypical people and they start talking fast, or saying things I still have a hard time following, like irony or mind games or just anything where people don’t mean what they say.”

“Neurotypical?” Charles hadn’t heard that word since his Psych 101 course as an undergrad.

“You. You’re neurotypical. I have ADHD. I’m neurodivergent. I can communicate with neurotypical people, but it’s always going to be a second language. Things get lost in translation, and I have an accent. I usually understand what’s going on, but I can’t process it and respond fast enough to speak without my ADHD accent. Except if I’m really comfortable around someone. My mom and dad say they hardly notice at all anymore.”

Charles got to thinking about what it would be like if had to communicate in French all the time, without anyone around who spoke his native language. “It sure would be interesting to see how your mind works.”

“Do you want to look?” Erik asked. “Is your telepathy back? You could tell me how I’m different and I could understand things better!”

He sounded so eager it made Charles’ breath catch. Like with Marie last night, and her willingness to let Charles come into her mind. Having his mutation accepted, even wanted, was a new experience.

“It’s still gone. Part of my head feels blocked off and gone. I’m still dizzy,” Charles said. He thought about standing up and trying to walk, so he could stagger until Erik caught him. His biggest regret from blowing up at Erik last night was throwing himself out of Erik’s arms. He’d been liking it too much; that was part of what had rattled him so badly. Being held so gently, so protectively, threw him off. 

Bruno, his law school boyfriend, wasn’t like that at all. Bruno liked to kiss him until his mouth hurt, and fuck him so hard he had to lie when he said it was good. He still remembered the revelation it had been when Natasha had grabbed his face in her hands, yanked him so close he couldn’t see anything but her, and yelled at him, “It is not okay for your boyfriend to hurt you!” For some reason, that had never occurred to him before. 

Charles was a little bit embarrassed that he was 23 years old and had only had one boyfriend. After Bruno dumped him, he only went out twice with that other guy before finding out he was only after Charles’ money. After that, Charles was paranoid and didn’t want to date anymore. Grindr was a shitty experience, so he quit that too. His grades got really good instead, so it wasn’t a total loss.

While listening to Erik talk about telepathy, Charles compared Erik to Bruno, his chin sinking into his hand while he wished he could trace his fingers along the angular planes of Erik’s face. Charles had liked people, he’d even loved people, but he didn’t think he’d ever fully trusted anyone before. The fear of trusting Erik twisted together with the aching hope that he might have met someone trustworthy.

Later that day, when Erik dropped him off at home along with his new clothes, a cot and decent air mattress from Erik’s camping supplies, and pots, utensils and dishes that Erik didn’t use because his mom had given him too many, Charles walked back into an empty apartment that didn’t seem nearly as bleak as it had yesterday morning and decided that he was glad his mother had cut him off so decisively. Anything less, and he might not have come to Avalon and met Erik. 


	6. Assault

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning for workplace sexual harassment

Monday morning, Charles got dressed in clothes Erik had bought for him. While he was still embarrassed that Erik had bought him clothes, it was better than being embarrassed by what he was wearing. He tucked the blue striped shirt into black trousers, with a black leather belt with a simple silver buckle. Charles had insisted on returning the other two blazers, but he’d kept this one - a navy blue that made his eyes look bluer and his mouth look redder.

The store clerk had thought the two of them were dating. Charles couldn’t help but smile every time he thought of it. He was meeting Erik for breakfast this morning, and while it wasn’t a date, he still wanted to look good. He’d never thought that a blazer that only cost $85 (on sale) could look this sharp. After a while, he realized he would be late to Bella’s Cafe if he kept preening.

Erik grinned and checked him out when Charles walked up, and then he looked uncertain and looked away. Charles wished he hadn’t made things so awkward; Erik obviously thought Charles was still upset at Erik’s help with the clothes.

“You have excellent taste, Erik, thanks for the clothes,” Charles said.

“You’re welcome. Are you still going to show me how to speak in telepathy?”

Charles chuckled at the graceless change of subject, and went with it. “Sure.”

Teaching Erik to speak mind to mind was ridiculously easy. Charles accomplished it through a mouthful of pancakes.

_ Think a thought and intend for me to hear it. _

_ Like this? _

_ Excellent. We’re done. _

Erik started to laugh. Charles found it funny that when Erik laughed, his mouth took up about sixty percent of his face, so he laughed too, which was an awkward thing to do with a mouthful of pancakes. Then that feedback loop of ridiculousness that Charles hadn’t experienced since he was a carefree kid kicked in, and laughing seemed to be enough reason to laugh even more and the two of them laughed until they teared up, without ever saying one word out loud. The looks they got from the café staff just made it funnier.

When they left the café, the bonelessness of laughing himself breathless left Charles unsteady on his feet, and he caught at Erik’s arm. Erik’s fingers pressed over his just for a moment, then released, and Charles let go too. They didn’t speak, either out loud or in their minds, the rest of the way to the office, and the companionable silence was enough.

“Let’s call the Pentagon together,” Charles suggested, because then Erik would stay with him longer.

Charles googled a phone number for the Pentagon and spent fifteen minutes in a phone tree before he could ask a live human to transfer him to the Defense Enhanced Personnel Department, the innocuous name for what Logan claimed was the office that ran Black Ops. 

“Pentagon,” a man answered crisply.

“Yes, I’m trying to reach the Defense Enhanced Personnel Department,” Charles said in his politest voice.

“Go ahead.”

“My name is Charles Xavier. I’m a lawyer with Frost & Shaw in Avalon, Pennsylvania, and I represent a veteran of yours who is having some difficulty getting his pension.”

“I’ll transfer you to Veteran Affairs.”

“No, don’t transfer me. We’ve already tried that. I’m calling on behalf of a man named Logan Howlett, code name Wolverine, who says he was Black Ops in the Korean War, and Vietnam. Something called Team X under the command of Colonel Stryker. There was some irregularity about his service records and he can’t go through normal channels to get his pension.” Charles read off Logan’s serial number.

There was a pause so long that Charles worried they’d been disconnected, and then the man told him to hold. After a click and a beep, another man came on the line. Charles repeated everything he’d already said, and got told to hold again. A third click and a beep, and Charles said it all again, only this time they were on a speakerphone and there were several people on the other end of the line.

“Let me repeat this back to you and you tell me if it makes sense,” the third man they’d talked to said. “Wolverine, who would be close to a hundred years old if he’s still alive, got some British lawyer to call and ask about his pension? Do you want to give me a reason to not open an investigation into how a foreign national got his hands on classified information?”

_ Oh damn, your accent. _

Charles leaned away from the phone and Erik leaned in. “This is Erik Lehnsherr, the other attorney representing Logan Howlett. This information isn’t classified, and Howlett gave it to us.”

The crowd at the Pentagon must have pressed the mute button, because the phone went totally silent before a fourth person came back on the line and asked for their names, how to spell them, which law firm they worked at, the address, and contact information for Logan Howlett.

Erik balked at that last one. “You can contact our client through us.”

“Mr. Lehnsherr, you and Mr. Xavier have an appointment at our office at ten hundred hours this Friday morning. Bring this person who claims to be Mr. Howlett with you.” 

_ Erik, they don’t know he’s a mutant! They think we’re lying because any human would have died of old age by now! _

Charles thought that insight would help; he hadn’t counted on Erik getting angry.

“He doesn’t claim to be Logan Howlett, he  _ is  _ Logan Howlett, code name Wolverine. He’s the same person who did your dirty work in your wars, and right now he’s having trouble paying his electric bill because you people refused to give him a pension after mutants got banned from the military! He’s got representation now, and you won’t be able to ignore him like some dirty little secret and hope he goes away!”

_ Erik, shut up! _

_ They don’t get to do this to him just because he’s a mutant! _ Erik’s outrage set the words on fire.

“My colleague and I will be there Friday morning,” Charles broke in, and ended the call before Erik could yell at high-ranking military officials again.

_ What the hell, Erik? _

There weren’t words in response, just a jumbled mass of anger at the way mutants are treated and outrage that people keep breaking the rules. Charles hadn’t yet gotten into Erik’s head to explore his ADHD, but he caught a glimpse of Erik’s frustration -- he worked so hard to learn the rules of a world that didn’t make sense to him. Injustice broke the rules. Besides the anger anyone would feel at injustice, Erik layered on his anger that neurotypical people kept changing the rules, mocking his efforts to learn their language and fit in, making the world incomprehensible again. Logan’s pension was no longer just about Logan’s pension; it was about Erik’s insistence that the world follow the rules.

Charles handed Erik a few paper clips and a cautious smile. Erik mangled them before getting up and walking out, without returning the smile. All the good feelings from this morning burned away in Erik’s anger burst, and Charles decided he should be a bit more cautious about this developing friendship with Erik.

* * *

The copy machine jammed again. Charles bent over to yank out the paper drawer and reached up into the rollers to pull on the paper that had gotten caught.

“Mmm, nice,” Shaw said, walking past Charles to open the cupboard full of office supplies.

Charles straightened up without getting the paper untangled. It was possible Shaw wasn’t talking about his butt in the new khakis Erik had bought him, so he didn’t say anything. He knelt down to work on the jammed paper, rather than bend over and stick his butt back out. “Hello.”

“How are things, Charles? How’s your workload?” Shaw asked, leaning against the cabinet and watching Charles remove the paper in torn remnants.

“Fine, thanks. Most of my day is still document review for the DJP Health case. The pro bono case I’m working on with Erik is turning out to be more time-consuming than we’d first thought, but it’s very interesting,” Charles said. 

Shaw came over to lean on the copy machine instead. “Don’t feel like you have to do everything Erik tells you to do, Charles. Pro bono clients can turn into a real time sink. I’d hate to see you waste yourself as Erik’s assistant.”

Shaw leaned towards Charles, who was still on his knees. Creepy. Charles jerked back and away, standing up and leaving the last shreds of paper still jamming the rollers. “We’re working on the case together.”

“You want to watch the direction your career takes. Even these first few months can have an impact on your future. I was hoping to get you more involved with me. Could you stay late tonight? I can get you up to speed on my client who tried to sell his business and had it fall through. It would give you a chance to see the pre-litigation negotiations.” Shaw smiled and pushed thoughts at Charles. 

Charles looked away, licking his lips because they got dry when he was nervous. He’d been too well-trained by his mother to ever respond to information he only picked up telepathically to tell Shaw to keep his dirty thoughts to himself. Instead, he tensed and fished his copies out of the tray, cringing when Shaw almost touched him when he leaned over Charles to pick up the hole-punch.

“That would be fine,” Charles lied, and got out of the copy room. 

He wanted to talk to Erik, but then he worried that Erik would get upset again. That explosion of temper two days ago when they had called the Pentagon had shocked Charles. Mixing that temper in with the weird office politics might be a bad combination. Besides, Erik was taking over too much of his life already. He should be able to make decisions and work on assignments that had nothing to do with Erik. Also, Erik had admitted his ADHD affected his interactions with people, so he might not catch all the nuances of Charles’ worry about Shaw, or he might do something to make things even more awkward. Charles thought all that through and then decided there was no reason to tell Erik he was staying late to work on a project with Shaw.

* * *

Charles ended up telling Erik about the project with Shaw anyway, mostly because Erik was too direct to take a hint and stop asking questions.

“Why are you working late tonight, Charles?”

“I just have some things to get done.” Shouldn’t lawyers work late? That was practically a cliché established by John Grisham novels, except not in Avalon, where the office was deserted by 6:30. The positive work-life balance was actually a good thing.

“You don’t have a deadline tomorrow,” Erik pointed out. 

Erik would know; he knew everything Charles was doing, and sometimes that felt suffocating. Charles’ eyebrows quirked down. He looked over at his computer screen and wished Erik would take a hint and go away without Charles needing to say anything directly. There was a reason so much social interaction took place nonverbally. He liked Erik, he really did, but he was leery of having someone involved in every single facet of his life again. Letting Erik help him with clothes and household stuff had gone well, and he had needed Erik’s help after that encounter with Marie, but it would be dangerous to trust without boundaries again. That had turned out badly with his mother, and if you couldn’t trust your mother, you couldn’t trust anyone. 

Erik dropped into the chair by Charles’ desk and picked up a paperclip from the office supplies that Charles kept there for him. “Who else is working late?”

That’s what this was about? Erik didn’t want him working with anyone but him? Charles had been warned about Erik’s possessive streak and how difficult he could be to work with. Maybe this was just an ADHD thing, and Erik would understand if he explained it. 

“Erik, I can’t do all of my work only with you. I’ve been here for more than a month now. I appreciate everything you’ve done, but I have to make some other connections with other attorneys too.” 

“Are you working with Shaw?” Erik’s attention was fully on the paper clips.

Damn office politics. He didn’t want to get caught in a turf war.

“Does it matter?”

Erik’s gaze was now fixed on the wall to Charles’ left; he couldn’t make eye contact when he was upset.

“Walk to the courthouse with me. I’ve got something I need to file.” Erik stood up and walked out of Charles’ office without another glance.

That was a bald-faced lie. They filed everything electronically with the court. Fine. If Erik wanted a fight, he would get a fight. Charles followed Erik down the hall to the elevator, wishing he wasn’t wearing the clothes Erik had bought him. It undercut his bid for independence. He was going to start paying Erik back for the clothes right now, and not wait until he had furniture. He’d gotten a paycheck last Friday and still had some of it left. Well, not really (first-year associates in small law firms in small cities don’t make a whole lot), but he could be late with the utilities payment if it meant showing Erik that he could take care of himself. 

Neither of them said anything on the elevator ride together, though Charles could feel Erik taking his mental shields down. Oddly, what he could now sense from Erik was misery and embarrassment, rather than the irritation and possessiveness he’d expected. Charles’ defensiveness evaporated. 

Outside, Erik turned them towards the courthouse, which was a 20 minute walk. He didn’t say anything. Charles could sense the misery and embarrassment intensifying, along with confusion, so he decided to help out.

“Is there a reason you’re worried about me working late with Shaw?”

“I worked late with Shaw. He took me to lunch a lot of times too. I was new, and afraid I would never be a good lawyer. He said I was really smart and had a good future and he’d help me out any way he could,” Erik said. “He was really nice to me, like, all the time. No one is ever nice to me all the time. I thought he was my friend and mentor. I thought I could trust him.”

Just the amount of anguish in Erik’s tone and the embarrassment radiating from his mind was enough to tip Charles off about what was coming. He wished he could take Erik’s hand.

“He would say stuff . . . you know? Like, awkward stuff. Except it was compliments, and you’re supposed to say ‘thank you’ when someone tells you that you look good.” Erik looked to Charles for reassurance. 

“Yes, you typically have to thank someone when they pay you a compliment,” Charles said. Validating one of Erik’s rules of behavior seemed the best way to reassure him that he hadn’t done anything wrong.

“Janos heard some of it, but later he said he didn’t.” Erik stopped talking for a minute because they were crossing a street and there were other people within earshot. He picked up the story again on the other side. “He touched me a couple of times, places where he wasn’t supposed to touch me, and then said it was an accident. When someone says something was an accident, you’re supposed to say ‘that’s okay,’ and not let it bother you anymore. Right, Charles?”

“Right,” Charles replied. He wanted to  _ kill _ Shaw for grooming someone who wouldn’t understand how Shaw was using the rules of decent behavior against him.

“Shaw wanted me to work late with him. I had to say yes.” Erik looked at Charles for reassurance again, and Charles nodded back.

“He kissed me that evening. I pushed him off and yelled at him. I’m bigger than he is, and I was scared he’d call the cops on me and tell them I was beating him up, even though you can’t hit Shaw. You know that, right? He has an energy manipulation mutation. He absorbs whatever you do to him and throws it back on you. If you hit him, he can hit you back ten times harder. When I yelled at him, he just got super nice, like smiling at me and telling me I really wanted him to kiss me. He talked at me so much I wondered if he was right, and if it was all my fault that he kissed me. So I promised not to say anything as long as he didn’t fire me.”

“Oh, Erik.”

“A couple years after that, women started talking about things like that. You heard about the #MeToo movement, right?”

One would have to live under a rock to miss hearing about the #MeToo movement. “Yes, I heard about it,” Charles replied.

“That’s what happened to me, Charles. It was sexual harassment.” Erik looked at Charles, his expression anxious.

“Definitely, Erik, that was definitely sexual harassment.”

Erik’s face went very still and his jaw tensed. 

“Erik, did you ever tell anyone?”

It was a few minutes before Erik said yes, and described what had happened when he’d told Emma Frost about Shaw’s behavior.

“She didn’t believe you at all?” Charles asked, outraged.

“I think she did believe me. She read my mind about it, didn’t she? She just said I misinterpreted everything. I do that sometimes, Charles, I misinterpret things.” Erik gave a deep sigh, like he had been told this many times.

“You didn’t misinterpret this. What Shaw did was wrong.”

“Thanks.” Erik’s face had gone very still again, except for the blinking.

Seeing someone as strong and stern as Erik struggling with tears and humiliation twisted at something near Charles’ heart. “Did anyone believe you?”

“Just you.”

That brought Charles up short. “Do you mean you didn’t tell anyone besides Emma?”

“After Janos said he didn’t remember hearing Shaw say those things to me, I knew I couldn’t say anything else. They were all calling me a liar. I don’t have a twitter account, so I couldn’t say anything there. Besides, that was mostly hetero stuff with men and women.” Erik almost said something more, but then he seemed to think better of it and stopped his sentences.

Charles didn’t pluck the rest of the thought out of his head, though he was tempted. Erik was laying himself bare right now, and Charles wouldn’t take anything Erik wasn’t offering. They’d reached the courthouse by this time, so they turned around and started back.

“I tried to find another job, but I don’t interview very well. I have to stay here.”

“No wonder you’re always so tense at work.”

“That’s why I always have shields up around Emma.”

“Erik, I’m so sorry about what happened.” Charles would have gone on for quite some time with sympathy and validation, but Erik interrupted.

“I don’t want you to work late with Shaw. Except maybe he’ll leave you alone. I just want you to be careful.”

“About that,” Charles said. Slowly, because this was embarrassing for him too, and his mother had drilled into his head that he had to ignore everything he heard telepathically, Charles admitted that Shaw had pushed sex thoughts at him. “I shield really well, Erik, but it’s like sticking your fingers in your ears. If someone yells, you can still hear them. Shaw has been yelling at me, telepathically.”

“Do you pick up thoughts like that very often? I mean, if someone doesn’t know to shield around Emma and then thinks about how beautiful she is, she’s going to hear that, right? If a guy thinks you’re hot, you’re going to hear that if he doesn’t know you’re a telepath and isn’t shielding. Right?”

Charles shrugged. “It’s why I don’t go to gay bars for hookups anymore. It’s kind of like a never-ending sexual assault, mixed in with guys who are thinking I’m not worth their time. There’s nothing more demoralizing than knowing what a one-night stand really thinks of you.”

There was an awkward silence.

“Sorry, let’s get the conversation back to Shaw.”

“Yeah. Do you think he’ll leave you alone?”

“After what you’ve told me, and what he’s already doing to me on purpose, I can’t say for sure.” Charles had already picked up the lawyer trait of never expressing an opinion without caveats.

“Do you want my help?”

That gave Charles the space to think about whether or not he wanted Erik’s help, and what form that help could take. It was good to have Erik realize there were boundaries, and he wasn’t going to take over Charles’ life entirely. In fact, after this conversation, Charles felt guilty he hadn’t wanted to talk to Erik about working with Shaw tonight. Erik wasn’t out to hurt him; he just wanted to help and he was clumsy about it sometimes. “Would you mind working late too? That way it wouldn’t just be the two of us in the office.”

“Okay,” Erik agreed immediately. “And do you want to link with my mind? Could you fix it so I can hear what’s going on?”

“I’ve always wondered about that,” Charles said. “Back when I was younger, I thought I’d make a great spy because I could have other people seeing what I see without a camera. But I’ve never tried it with anyone.”

“Want to try? We could spy on Shaw!” Erik was grinning now.

“Let’s practice. You go over there,” Charles pointed, “and let’s see if I can link your mind and you can see what I’m seeing.”

Erik followed instructions. Once they were facing away from each other and out of earshot, Charles touched Erik’s mind and then invited him in. The sense of Erik in his mind was comfortable, like the relationship with Raven back when they were still friends.

_ Can you see? _ Charles asked.

_ Yes. I can see what you’re seeing. Go stand by someone who’s talking. Let’s check if I can hear too. _

Charles meandered over to a woman who was talking loudly on a cell phone and pretended to dust some lint off his trousers once he was in earshot.

_ I can hear her! She’s pissed at her husband, isn’t she? _

_ Cool. We’re spies. _ Charles was grinning.  _ Can you still see and hear around you too? _

_ Yeah. It’s like watching tv while texting at the same time. No problem. _

_ Let’s see if it goes both ways. I’m going to try and see out of your eyes now. _

It took a bit of concentration because Charles had never tried anything like this before, but within a few minutes, he was seeing the view from Erik’s eyes and hearing through Erik’s ears. He had to concentrate harder though, and couldn’t pay much attention to what was going on around him. He wondered if that was because he was the telepath, or if it was because Erik was just naturally better at processing multiple inputs at once. Didn’t people with ADHD often have sensory issues? Would Erik have been trained by a therapist about how to manage sensory input and keep it from overwhelming him? He might actually be better at doing things like that than Charles because he would have needed to develop specific techniques.

They spent the next thirty minutes goofing off with their new talent, ending with Charles going into a bistro and ordering for Erik, with Erik reading the menu through his eyes. By the time they were munching pastries while sitting on a bench in the bus stop, Charles’ upcoming evening with Shaw was seeming more like a spy adventure and less like a high-stress potential nightmare.

* * *

“Get the door, would you Charles?” Shaw said when Charles walked into his office that evening holding a yellow legal pad and a pen.

Charles swung the door shut behind him and sat down in one of the overstuffed leather chairs in the corner office. Shaw had bookshelves with actual books on them, the law reporters lined up by number like soldiers.

After a bit of awkward chitchat, Shaw started telling him about his client, Lebrayton, who had tried to structure a sale of her formalwear business using seller financing and then had it fall apart. “We’ve got a breach of contract claim, but the concern is that if we push too hard, the buyer will file bankruptcy, and then we’re out even more. The buyer has a few insurance claims, and if those pay out, she may have enough assets to justify the cost of filing a lawsuit.”

Charles was writing so fast his handwriting scrawled, trying to catch all the ins and outs of the legal maneuvering going on.

There was a tap on the door, and then Emma came in. “Oh, I didn’t know you had Charles in here.”

“Yes, he’s going to be helping me on this Lebrayton matter. The search for the money will be good training,” Shaw said.

Charles compared Shaw’s mercenary machinations to Erik’s determination to help Logan and wondered if the desire to help people was something that wore off gradually the longer you worked as a lawyer.

“I’m sure the training will pay off better with Charles than with some others we’ve worked with,” Emma said. “Sebastian, you’re not going to be too late tonight, are you?”

Emma switched to mental speak with Sebastian, and bloody hell, had they forgotten that he was a telepath too and mental shielding couldn’t keep out deliberate conversations any more than sticking your fingers in your ears made you physically deaf? Charles coughed uncomfortably and tried to look anywhere but at Emma and Sebastian.

_ You okay? _ Erik asked through the link.

Charles gave a mental shrug. This evening wasn’t an adventure anymore. He was scared, and if anything happened, it would be his word against both Frost and Shaw. 

With a final silent comment that Charles wished he hadn’t heard, Emma sashayed out of the office in her white stilettos.

After Emma shut the door behind her, Sebastian turned that condescending smile on him, so Charles looked at his legal pad and said, “you were telling me about Lebrayton’s disclaimers on the seller financing.”

_ Skip it for now. Your ass in those pants has been driving me crazy all day. _

“Beg pardon?” Charles said, standing up and backing away from Shaw.

_ Don’t act like you don’t know what I’m talking about. You’ve been leading me on since you started work here. _

Through the link with Erik, Charles could hear his anger.  _ That’s what he said to me! He said I’d been leading him on! _

“This is just what my ass looks like, Sebastian, I’m not using it to lead you on. You’ve pushed sex thoughts at me several times now, and I don’t like it. Let’s talk about the Lebrayton case,” Charles said calmly, sitting back down and writing something meaningless to demonstrate how he wanted Shaw to start giving him a reason to take notes again.

There was a minute amount of hesitation from Shaw before he did as Charles suggested. “Lebrayton structured the deal so the sales price wouldn’t adjust downward if revenues fell. It’s not a deal I would have counseled a buyer to accept, but we weren’t representing either party at the time.” Shaw explained. He’d gone back to his desk to thumb through some paper.

“I take it the buyer was planning to make the payments out of business revenue?” Charles said. “Then when revenue fell, she couldn’t make the payments.”

“Essentially. The revenue drop wasn’t due to market conditions though. The driver of a semi-truck fell asleep at the wheel and plowed into the building in the middle of the night. That shut them down for months, plus all the lost inventory because you can’t sell a wedding dress with tire tracks on it,” Shaw said. “So there are plenty of insurance claims, which Lebrayton claims are adequate to make the payments on the promissory note, but of course the buyer wants to use the money to rebuild.”

“Imagine that,” Charles said drily. Why couldn’t they represent the good guy once in a while?

_ Right? _ Erik commented.  _ It’s why I take these pro bono cases.  _

Shaw gave Charles one of those condescending smiles. “I know what you’re thinking, but paying your legal obligations is every bit as important as making a profit. Where would we be if people could just cancel a $3 million dollar debt? Our client needs that money to finance her current business venture. It’s like dominoes, Charles.”

Shaw had come back around to the front of his desk again, and was leaning on it, which put him uncomfortably close to Charles’ chair in front of the desk.

“Was Lebrayton willing to allow a payment furlough? Or reduce the amount of payments while the buyer rebuilt the building and acquired new inventory? I could think of a couple of options that aren’t as drastic as suing the buyer and hoping to collect the insurance payout,” Charles said.

“Like I said, Lebrayton needs those payments to finance her current business. She’s opened a spa, and it takes a while for a business like that to start to turn a profit. These payments the buyer isn’t making are causing her to default on payments to her current vendors, and she’s had to cut back staff. People are losing their jobs, Charles. We don’t want that, now do we?” Shaw was now sitting in the office chair next to Charles, and at that last sentence, he reached over and put a hand on Charles arm.

_ Did he just threaten to fire you? _ Erik asked.

_ I think it’s only an insinuation at this point. _

It was a terrifying insinuation, though. Charles knew how hard it was to find a job, and what it felt like to be hungry. “I think I understand the facts and some of the motivations now. What’s our next step?” Charles asked briskly, shifting his arm away from Shaw’s hand.

“The deadlines in the demand letters have expired, so I’ll need your help to draft the complaint. Have you ever drafted a complaint before?” Shaw put his hand back on Charles’ arm.

“I can ask Erik for help,” Charles said. “Stop touching my arm.” Before Erik, Charles would have played Shaw’s game, pretending not to notice the awkwardness and attempting to tell him no while letting him save face. His mother had trained him to avoid confrontation and appease bullies. But with Erik in his head, Charles was both braver and more direct. 

“Let’s leave Erik out of this. I’ll give you a couple of complaints from other cases so you can see the format, and let’s discuss causes of action tomorrow evening. We can order in dinner. How does that sound?” Shaw wasn’t touching his arm anymore, but he was leaning into Charles’ personal space.

“Sounds great.” Charles capped his pen and stood up. “Was that all?” Later, when he agonized over what happened next, he decided that he should have just walked out at that point, but Shaw was the attorney who had given him the job, and somehow that meant that Charles needed his permission to leave his office.

Shaw stood up too, caught Charles’ head in his hand, and held him there, cheeks pressed together while he forced thoughts into Charles’ mind --  _ Someone should dowse you in glitter and put you on a street corner -- _ followed by images of what Shaw would do after he picked up Charles.

Charles tried to twist out of Shaw's grasp, but he was handicapped by Erik’s warning about Shaw’s energy manipulation mutation and the fear that Shaw would hurt him if he fought too hard. At the same time, he was humiliated by what Shaw was doing and scared that if he offended Shaw, he might lose his job. What would he do if Shaw fired him? Sure, he could sue, but his rent was due next week and a lawsuit payout would be years away. All of his courage in defending against the comments and casual touches evaporated when the situation turned into an open confrontation. 

Charles pushed lightly against Shaw’s torso, trying to extricate himself without giving Shaw a way to hurt him. Shaw let him pull away, but not before he brushed lips gently across Charles’ cheek, as if they were lovers and Charles wanted this. Charles could see the fear on his face reflected in the gloating that painted Shaw’s features. He trailed fingers over Charles’ face in a travesty of an intimate gesture that made Charles’ insides shrivel up.

“Don’t,” was all Charles could come up with, and it was more of a plea than a command.

There was a crash against the door, like Erik had run into it with his shoulder before he opened it. “Get your hands off him!”

Shaw had already let go.

“What the hell are you doing, Erik?” Shaw demanded, as if Erik was the one who had just been caught doing something wrong.

“I linked minds with him,” Charles said. “He was in my head when you grabbed me.” There, let Shaw try to weasel his way out of that one! Erik was a witness to the sexual assault, and now they could report it.

Shaw smiled like Charles had said exactly what he wanted him to say. “Telepathy? You really are trying to get written up for violating the Casey-Kenton Standards for the Ethical Use of Telepathy, aren’t you?”

“What? No!”

“Charles, the reason witnesses can’t testify about telepathic experiences is because they’re so easily manipulated. How does Erik know what he saw? Maybe he was just listening in on one of your fantasies. You’ve always wanted me to kiss you. If you didn’t, you could have stopped me. Maybe you came on to me and I was fighting your telepathic commands. You’re a C2 telepath, I looked up the news stories about the Xavier heir when you first manifested. Communication  _ and  _ control. Emma’s only a C1 telepath, but she knows the truth about you too. Why do you even try to lie about it?” Shaw looked like he was the cat and Charles was the mouse. Turning the situation around like that was so much like what his mother would do that Charles lost all his defiance and couldn’t think of anything to say.

Erik stepped into the silence. “Here’s what we’re going to do, Shaw. You’re going to treat Charles like a professional colleague and nothing more from now on. I know what you did to me, and I’m still within the statute of limitations to report it. Then if you fire me, you run afoul of the whistleblower statutes. I’m coming to the meeting you’re having with Charles tomorrow evening. Sure, let’s get dinner. Order me a steak. I’ll be sitting right here with you the whole time.” The open threat in Erik’s flat stare was refreshing when compared to the manipulative malice of Shaw’s smile.

Charles could hear the thoughts racing through Shaw’s mind as he weighed the mess of an official sexual harassment claim against the possibility that he’d win against claims made by gay men. There was also a streak of pure hatred directed towards Erik that Charles didn’t understand and didn’t have time to follow through to its source. Threaded through all of that was Shaw’s intention to get his hands on a share of the Xavier fortune. 

“Keep your hands and your thoughts to yourself,” was all Charles could contribute.

“Get out,” Shaw told him, and for once he wasn’t smiling. “Get a complaint from Erik and get me a draft by lunchtime tomorrow.” He turned around and walked away from them to sit at his desk.

Erik grabbed Charles by the arm and pulled him out of the office, which was unnecessary because Charles was already leaving.


	7. Blocked

Charles and Erik were outside before either one of them spoke verbally about what had happened. Erik was flooding their mental connection though, until Charles broke the link. Erik felt exultant, empowered even, because he had confronted Shaw and hadn’t been intimidated into silence. Being able to defend Charles helped heal the pain he’d lived with these past three years. 

Charles, on the other hand, was shattered. He couldn’t hide it from himself. What he’d wanted to do when Shaw grabbed him was to beg not to be fired. He couldn’t face another job search, the fear of being hungry, knowing that he was on his own again because he’d managed to find someone else just like his mother, and the crippling fear that he’d just land himself in another situation like this one. He was a coward, he really was. Besides, Shaw didn’t even do anything that was all that bad, he told himself. A couple of touches on the arm, being held close to Shaw’s face, and a few thoughts forced into his head. The kiss on his cheek might have been his imagination; maybe he'd turned his head and run into Shaw's mouth. If he tried to report it, they’d just roll their eyes and tell him to stop being so over-sensitive. He shouldn't be so shaken up. Nothing bad even happened.

Erik didn’t notice Charles’ mental state because he was so pumped up. “The look on that ugly face! I scared him. He fakes like he isn’t doing anything wrong, but he knows it’s wrong. He won’t try anything with you again; I’ll see to that,” Erik said.

“That’s good, Erik,” Charles said, not bothering to sound grateful. 

There was a pause while Erik tried to process how to respond to Charles. “Are you alright? I stopped him. I won’t let him hurt you again.”

Charles wished that he could take care of himself. He wasn’t upset at Erik; he was upset at his own response to the situation. He knew exactly what Shaw was doing, and he’d still been more afraid of losing his job than he was of being used like that. “It rattled me to be that afraid, even though I knew you were coming.”

“I should have gotten there faster,” Erik said.

“No, it wasn’t that.” Charles hesitated, and then decided to try and explain. “When this evening started, I thought the link with you would keep me from feeling scared. When I get scared I tend to just cave in and give the scary person whatever he wants. I hate that about myself, I really do. I thought I wouldn’t feel that way because you were there, but I did anyway. I couldn’t fight him because of his mutation, and I couldn’t stand the thought that he might be mad at me. I wanted to apologize to Shaw for not wanting him to kiss me and then beg him not to fire me. I’m mad at myself for that.”

Erik puzzled that through, and then said the wrong thing. “But, Charles, Shaw was right when he said you could have stopped him. I mean, if you’re a C2 telepath like Shaw said. You can just make people do anything, right?”

“No, I can’t!” Charles yelled. “I can’t defend myself! Everyone thinks I can, and I don’t even dare tell people I can’t because the fear that I’ll control someone’s mind is the only defense I’ve got, even though it isn’t true for me. I can’t stop anyone from doing anything.”

Oh, damn. He was never supposed to say that to anyone. By this time, they’d gotten to the parking garage and Erik unlocked his car without keys. Charles got into the passenger seat, wishing he hadn’t yelled, and wishing even harder that he hadn’t told the truth. He slumped against the car door and put his forehead on the window glass. “Please don’t ever repeat that to anyone, please, Erik.”

Charles sensed that goodwill towards him that Erik consistently felt and took that as a nonverbal answer. They drove out of the parking garage and turned right onto Banner Avenue. Charles noticed that Erik didn’t use a key in the ignition either. He’d never heard of a telekinetic who could move the ignition wires in a car before. Erik must have very fine control of his mutation, or maybe he was limited to moving only tiny things, like forks and wires and paper clips.

“Are you blocked?” Erik asked quietly.

Only someone as socially awkward as Erik would ask a completely inappropriate and totally obvious question like that.

Since Charles’ life had spun out of his control, there was a certain recklessness that prodded him to say and do things he would not have otherwise said or done. What did it matter if Erik knew? He’d already told him anyway.

“Yes,” Charles said, his voice surly.

There was a long pause. Erik drove, and Charles didn’t watch where they were going. He didn’t care where he ended up; he really didn’t.

“I thought that was just used on criminals and really dangerous mutants,” Erik said.

“Yes, Erik,” Charles said, letting sarcasm tinge his voice. “And so using your skills of legal deduction, what’s the obvious conclusion here? How about the alternative, which is that there are ways around the rules if you have enough money.” And if you owned the company that made the drugs used in blocking. That helped too. His mother and stepfather knew the drugs and knew the doctors; ethics didn’t stand a chance.

He felt Erik’s hand on his arm, fingertips trailing down, and then Erik took his hand and squeezed it gently. It was too much for Charles’ composure. Charles didn’t let go of Erik’s hand, and he did his best not to make any noise so Erik wouldn’t know he was crying, but eventually he did have to blot his face on his sleeve, the white button down shirt that Erik had bought for him.

Oh, who the hell cared anymore? Erik had taken over his entire life. He may as well have this detail too.

“I persuaded my mother that she had a daughter. This was the year my father had died, and just after my powers manifested and I was beginning to realize how much people dislike telepaths. I was twelve years old and honestly felt like I was dying of loneliness. I found a mutant vagabond thieving in our kitchen and decided if she was my sister, I would have at least one friend in the world. For nearly a year, my mother was sure Raven was my twin sister. I thought twins would be best, you see? That way I didn’t have to create new memories of birthday parties and the like, just add a person to the memories my mother already had. And if we were twins, then I had never been alone, not even before I was born.”

Erik’s hand tightened on his.

“I’d forgotten about the photo albums,” Charles said. “She had a personal assistant who was supposed to print out pictures of our family and put them in a book every so often. Mother is rather old school about some formalities. My mother doesn’t have many friends, so it wasn’t until after she married Marko and people met her ‘twins’ that someone sat her down with the photo albums and showed her that Raven really wasn’t her daughter. She couldn’t throw Raven out, of course, because then the neighbors would talk. But once she knew what I’d done,” Charles shrugged helplessly, “I couldn’t erase that.”

“That’s not _ criminal, _ Charles! Being blocked is for terrorists, or serial killers -- you know, the mutants who could destroy the whole world and have said they want to. You can’t be blocked for tricking your mother! Couldn’t you say you were too young to really know what you were doing? She’s your _ mother, _Charles! Once she forgave you, who insisted on having you blocked?” Erik demanded.

Now Charles couldn’t keep quiet, and he heaved with sobs until he could strangle them silent again. “You know what, Erik? Someday I really want to meet your mother,” Charles said, once he got himself under control again.

“You want to meet my mother?” Erik asked, puzzled, as he parked the car.

“She’d forgive you for anything, wouldn’t she?” Charles could feel Erik’s confusion.

“She’s my mom,” Erik said, as if that answered the question. It probably did, actually.

“My mother is different,” Charles said quietly, and then he didn’t say anything else. Erik should already know that. They’d already had the conversation about her leaving Charles broke and hungry.

“Do you want to spend the night on my couch? Instead of alone in your apartment?” Erik offered.

“Yeah, I do,” Charles replied, a little bereft because Erik had taken his hand back. Just having Erik’s mind close by would help ease the hurt he was feeling right now. “I have to get to the office early tomorrow if I’m going to get that complaint drafted before lunch.” It made him sick to think of it. Shaw could treat him like that, and still order him around, and Charles had to put up with it because he needed the job.

“Nobody gets a complaint drafted that fast, and Shaw knows it. You’re nowhere near the statute of limitations, so there’s no real rush,” Erik said. He locked the car doors, again without a key, and walked with Charles towards the apartment building.

Charles shrugged. Shaw was a bully; rational stuff wouldn’t change anything. Once he was in Erik’s apartment, he just stood there uselessly and let Erik do everything. He felt so empty and drained. After Erik made up the bed on the couch, he called his name and Charles looked over. Erik had pushed some of the Legos out of the way and set a cup of steaming tea on the table. 

“You have tea?” Charles asked. Most people didn’t.

“You said you liked it once. I bought some,” Erik replied.

Charles sat down to drink tea. “Thanks.” 

Erik sat down across from him, studying Charles with a worried expression. He wasn’t even fidgeting with the Legos.

With a sigh, Charles said, “Go ahead and ask.”

“Does it hurt when you use telepathy?”

“No. Communicating with you is fine; hearing thoughts is fine. The block was set around any attempt to influence someone else’s mind. I can’t plant thoughts or memories in anyone else’s mind, or cause illusions. I certainly cannot control anyone. I was originally a C2 telepath, now I’m a C1. I didn’t lie about the category.” He sipped tea. “I can’t stop someone from hurting me.”

“That’s not fair.”

Charles shrugged. “No one who isn’t a C2 telepath can stop someone from hurting them either. I’m just closer to normal this way.” He gave Erik a sardonic smile. 

“They could make the block that specific?” Erik prodded.

“That’s been the result. They don’t try to block a mutation entirely anymore,” Charles' voice faltered. Every mutant knew about Jason Stryker, the illusionist who was the first mutant blocked. He died shortly after the procedure was finished; the autopsy showed six aneurysms. “I wasn’t always aware of exactly what they were doing while they were implanting the blocks, of course.”

“Yeah.”

Needles still terrified him; he’d been on an IV drip off and on for a month, and he could swear that the orderly who did the stick missed his vein on purpose at least six times before he would get the IV in. The suppressant drugs burned when they went in. They couldn’t give him painkillers because that would interfere with the drugs they gave him to make him more susceptible to the hypnosis. 

He’d lost eight pounds throughout the ordeal that he couldn’t afford to lose, and they ended up feeding him intravenously when his drug-induced panic attacks made it impossible for him to swallow for days at a time. The panic attacks were the key to the block. Any attempt to use his power in a way that violated the hypnotically implanted boundaries would set off a panic attack -- the ones that made you want to die just to stop the feelings. He’d only set off one, shortly after he’d been released from the hospital and he tried to make Raven forget what they’d done to him so they could go back to being best friends. They shouldn’t have let her visit him in the hospital. She shouldn’t have seen him like that. It was his fault that she’d seen the panic attack, though. 

After that, she avoided him. Charles picked up enough of her thoughts to know that the guilt was all directed at herself; she blamed herself for being the reason they’d blocked Charles. He tried to talk to her about it, but no relationship can survive that much guilt. A couple years later, he’d left for college. Raven had been sent to Europe to study art. It got Raven out of the country and away from Sharon without throwing her back on the streets, so Charles told himself things had worked out alright for Raven. The way his mother covered up what Charles had done was to tell everyone that she’d voluntarily adopted Raven after seeing her talent for art and deciding to educate her. Fortunately, Raven did have genuine artistic ability.

“Are you alright, then? I mean, you’re not going to . . . ? There are problems, after a block. Are you . . . ?”

Charles plucked the end of the question out of Erik’s mind because he was too exhausted to be ethical right now. “No, I’m not suicidal. They’ve refined the technique somewhat.”

Erik nodded, looking so forlorn that Charles wanted to turn the situation around and comfort him instead. “I took some classes in college about the Mutant Rights Movement. I’ve read lots of books.”

“Yeah, me too. Depressing stuff, isn’t it?”

Erik picked up some Legos and started fitting them together at random.

Mutant rights had gained steam in the mid-1960s, alongside the racial rights movement. But where the blacks had Martin Luther King, Jr. and his doctrines of non-violence, the mutants had Max and Wanda Eisenhardt. The Eisenhardts raised money and bought a 250,000 acre ranch in Arizona that they named Genosha and proclaimed it to be a mutant sanctuary. Perhaps a sanctuary had been the original intention, but it quickly became more than that. The government suspected it would be more of a militant training ground. The magazine articles that Max Eisenhardt had written about mutant supremacy were reprinted and compared to _ Mein Kampf, _which was horrible considering that Max was a concentration camp survivor. Max responded to the accusations by radicalizing further.

When the Eisenhardts declared independence from the United States, Eisenhardt had used his metallokinetic mutation to tear apart the entire city of Chollas, Arizona, ripping the rebar out of every building, destroying the entire power grid with an electromagnetic pulse, and turning cars into shrapnel. He wiped out most of the Arizona National Guard in the worst attack on American soil since the Civil War, a legacy that wasn’t eclipsed until 9/11. 

President Lyndon B. Johnson declared a national emergency. The Eisenhardts still held off the entire U.S. military for another ten months in a conflict that came to be called the Siege of Genosha. Eisenhardt was the reason psychiatrists and pharmaceutical biologists had developed the blocking technique, which was permanent, unlike suppressant drugs. When the military finally defeated Max Eisenhardt in 1965 (Wanda committed suicide when the battle turned against them), he’d been blocked. He died in 1973. An official cause of death was never released; the President cited national security concerns.

After being blocked, Eisenhardt moved the battle to the courts, and sued the United States for violating his constitutional rights by preventing him from using his power. In 1972, the Supreme Court unanimously decided that the government had a compelling governmental interest in regulating mutant powers, and mutants had no constitutional right to use their powers. _ Eisenhardt v. United States _ was the reason that most mutants voluntarily picked up and moved to mutant magnet cities when their mutations manifested, to escape some of the legalized discrimination. _ Eisenhardt v. United States _ was the reason doctors were willing to implant blocks in the mind of a fourteen-year-old boy, and knew they could get away with it. 

Charles put his head down on his folded arms and wished Eisenhardt had never existed. “Damn Eisenhardt.” The catchphrase was thrown out in a tired sigh by any mutant who had faced the fear-based discrimination that made the plight of American mutants so much worse than in other first-world countries. It was a meme and a curse, a hiss and a byword.

“Yeah, damn Eisenhardt,” Erik echoed. He dropped his Legos and went in his bedroom and shut the door without even saying good night.

The sudden end to the intense conversation dismayed Charles. He finished his tea, wondering if he’d said something wrong. Honestly, after the handholding, and Erik taking care of him again, he’d hoped they were working up to something more, but he wasn’t going to follow Erik to his bedroom without an invitation. Likely, he was misreading things because he was so lonely and he was beginning to trust Erik. He washed out the teacup and curled up in the sheets on Erik’s couch. 

Memories of Shaw’s touch intruded as soon as he tried to relax. He wished he could alter his own memories. He wanted to pretend it was Erik touching his face instead. 

* * *

Charles emailed a draft complaint in the Lebrayton case to Shaw by the lunch deadline. Lots of people didn’t take lunch until 2:00, right? He hadn’t seen Shaw all morning, which was a relief. He now understood why Erik so rarely ate during the day. Just the tension of knowing Shaw could stick his head into Charles’ office at any time and pretend nothing happened last night twisted Charles’ stomach into knots. The humiliation of last night didn’t fade; it got stronger as time passed and Charles wondered what Shaw had passed on to Frost, and if he’d say something snide to Janos and Betsy about him. They’d all blacklisted Erik socially. As Erik’s friend and Shaw’s latest victim, Charles was due for the same treatment.

The complaint was shit. He knew he hadn’t even gotten the facts right, because that would have required talking to Shaw. There wasn’t enough in the case notes to get all the details. He’d cobbled together causes of action by looking at two other complaints that Erik had sent him. He should have had Erik look over the complaint before he sent it to Shaw, but he was afraid if he was any later, Shaw would come looking for him. He didn’t want to see Shaw. The only thing that could make last night worse would be seeing Shaw again.

Maybe he could get through the whole day without seeing Shaw. Tomorrow, he and Erik were going to be out of the office all day because they were taking Logan to the meeting at the Pentagon. Then the weekend. If he could make it until Monday, maybe he would have calmed down enough by then to act normally when Shaw was around.

At about 4:30, Charles was working on document review when he got an email from the Electronic Court Filing system, acknowledging the filing of a complaint. Charles clicked on it, wondering why the court was emailing him. The document opened, time-stamped and docketed by the court. It was the shitty Lebrayton complaint he’d sent Shaw a couple of hours ago. Why would Shaw file that with the court? It was awful. It was so awful, it was malpractice. 

Charles’ stomach lurched with a sudden suspicion, and he clicked down to the last page of the complaint. His name was beneath the signature line. Panicking now, he got into the docket itself and discovered that the complaint was tagged with his electronic account. Of course Shaw had the log-in information for everyone in the firm.

_ Erik! _ Charles shouted mentally, almost running down the hall to Erik’s office. He shut the door behind him. Erik sat back down, watching him warily. “Erik, he filed the complaint! The one I drafted this morning! He didn’t even give me any feedback, and we never talked about it, and I know I didn’t get all of the causes of action, and the facts are all wrong. He put my name on it, Erik! It’s malpractice! I’m going to have a malpractice claim against me! Erik! What do I do?”

“Did you issue a summons?” Erik asked.

“What the hell does that even mean?” Charles demanded. Why don’t lawyers speak in plain English? 

“Did you get an email notice about the summons, or just the complaint?” Erik asked.

“Just the complaint, I think,” Charles said. “What does that mean?”

“It means Angel can fix it,” Erik said.

“Angel can fix it?” Charles echoed in confusion. Angel could override Shaw?

“You’ve been super nice to her, right?” Erik headed out the door.

Charles stood next to Erik with his best ‘super nice’ smile while Erik asked if Angel could ask a case administrator at the court to put a hold on issuing any summons while they amended the complaint. It ended up with Angel calling Kelly, the case admin, having a long conversation about Kelly taking her dog to the vet, and then asking Kelly to put a hold on the summons until the complaint had been amended. 

When Angel hung up and said, “all fixed,” Charles heaved a huge sigh of relief. “What do I owe you?”

“Your right kidney,” Angel replied.

Charles blanched.

“I’m kidding! If we had a dollar for every time we rescued some dumb attorney who accidentally filed something, we could retire. Now go fix the complaint. The hold expires in two weeks.” She shooed him off with a tolerant smile.

“Thank you,” Charles said sincerely. “Truly, thank you.” He didn’t even mind being called ‘dumb’ when it wasn’t even his fault, since he’d just dodged a malpractice action against him.

“That’s why you always have to be super nice to the administrative support personnel,” Erik whispered to him as he walked him back to his office. “They can fix anything. Even after the summons is served, you’ve got three weeks to amend the complaint under Rule 15.”

“We don’t pay her enough, do we?” Charles replied, making a mental note to look up Rule 15.

Erik shook his head. “Do you want me to go with you when you talk to Shaw?”

“Right now?”

“Um.” Whatever Erik intended to say disappeared at the look on Charles’ face. “Why don’t you go home early? We can deal with this next week.”

Charles gratefully accepted the chance to avoid Shaw. “If anyone asks, I went home with a terrible headache.”

While he was shutting down his computer, Erik said, “I’ll pick you up at about 6:30 tomorrow morning.”

“Better make it 6:00. We might hit rush hour in D.C., and military types don’t want you to be late.”

Charles would rather take on the entire Pentagon than ever see Shaw again.


	8. Pentagon

Much of the drive to the Pentagon passed with Logan quizzing Charles about his collapse after linking minds with Marie, and describing Marie’s panic at temporarily being a telepath. Charles reassured Logan repeatedly that he was fine now. In fact, in order to convince him, Charles insisted that he was coming back to see Marie again. He had learned some things while in Marie’s mind, and he had some ideas about helping her. He mulled them over to distract himself from being nervous about how Erik might behave if he got angry at somebody really important.

Charles had been to the Pentagon before, in sixth grade, on a field trip for the Gifted and Talented class at his prep school. He mostly remembered the tour guide’s crisp military uniform and being awed at the sheer size of the building. All that room; all those people; all for one purpose. As long as there had been civilization, there had been war between civilizations. The Pentagon was impressive and hopeless at the same time. Couldn’t we just all get along?

The humans were trying to leave the mutants out of it now. The Mutant Non-Combatant Treaty had been proposed in 1991 and ratified by 189 Member States by 1995. The United States had been the first to ratify it, which was the condition precedent for Russia, China and India to accept its terms. Public support for the treaty had been overwhelming - the provisions which criminalized any aggressive mutant behavior had universal support among the humans. International mutant aggression was a war crime; domestic mutant aggression was terrorism. Mutant aggression could be prosecuted by any country. The treaty stripped offending mutants of the rights of citizenship. After Iraq made an example of a British intelligence operative convicted of using telepathy to gain state secrets, mutants essentially disappeared from government service.

Charles walked across the vast parking lot next to Logan, who was dressed in jeans with a massive belt buckle and a plaid button down shirt that wouldn’t have looked out of place at a rodeo. Charles wore his Italian suit, carrying his leather portfolio from New2You, full of a few random printouts from the Internet about military pensions. He just felt like a lawyer should carry a portfolio with papers in it. Erik had all the information for Logan’s case in a laptop case with buckled pockets on the side. Very swanky. Charles wanted one.

The Pentagon was an unadorned monolith of a building, imposing and functional. They joined the line at the visitor’s check-in, but where the people ahead of them had been waved through with a visitor’s lanyard, or sent to wait for the next tour to start, the three of them were ushered into a small room with a couch and a vending machine. They didn’t wait long before a woman in an Army dress uniform, complete with campaign ribbons and captain’s bars, came to collect them. She greeted Logan with a salute. Charles and Erik each got a handshake. The cordiality of the greeting was reassuring.

As they followed Captain Hallikans along the corridor, Charles checked in on Erik’s mental state. He was worried about Erik yelling at a general, or getting agitated and dropping the conversation to stare at a wall. But so far, Erik was fairly calm, with just the usual tension that anyone would feel about being in such a strange environment. The Pentagon had a unique mental vibe, a feeling of coiled danger wrapped in seventy layers of bureaucracy. Putting 23,000 people with a common goal in one building made for an interesting collective consciousness.

Or maybe Charles was the only one who could sense that.

Captain Hallikans led them through a door marked “No Admittance” and through a utilitarian antechamber with gray carpet and grayer walls. The next room they entered had oak shelving and crown molding. Then they walked down a hallway and to a door marked “Authorized Personnel Only.” Captain Hallikans entered a security code into the keypad, and the door buzzed before it unlocked. This was yet another antechamber. Charles was reminded of the mazes built into medieval fortresses to confuse attackers. At last, they reached a room with an actual human being in it. A man in a dress uniform looked up from a monitor when their group approached.

Captain Hallikans nodded at him.

The man picked up a phone, pressed a button, and said “they’re here.” Then he hung up and told Captain Hallikans they could go in.

Through the double doors, only the edges of Charles’ attention noticed that the carpet was plusher and the furniture wasn’t cheap. Four men and two women were in the room, uniforms marked with huge numbers of campaign ribbons, and gold piping on their shoulder boards and sleeves. Authority like a wave washed over his consciousness as all six of them stood up simultaneously and saluted Logan.

“Captain Howlett,” a tall man with gray hair in a military buzzcut said crisply.

“Lieutenant General Swann,” Logan replied, reading his name and rank from the uniform and returning the salute.

“Captain, I apologize for the phone call earlier this week. You caught us off guard. Once the matter was escalated to my attention, we were able to sort things out,” Swann said.

Introductions went around the room. Military people salute each other, instead of shaking hands, Charles learned. They shook his hand, and Erik’s hand, however. That was nice of them to accommodate civilian customs.

“I’ll get straight to the point,” General Swann said. “Your pension payments will be caught up with interest. Did you bring bank account information?”

Erik retrieved a document from his laptop case and pushed it across the table to General Swann, who glanced at it and passed it to Colonel Jesperson. “The request for interest on the late payments has already been processed.” Swann said to Jesperson, and it wasn’t a question.

“Yes, sir,” Jesperson replied. He took the document and left the room.

“We didn’t request interest,” Erik said.

“I did,” Swann informed him. Then something in his demeanor shifted and he dropped some of the formality. “This should never have fallen through the cracks in the first place. Captain, I will get you confirmation that the back pay has all been deposited in your account before you leave today.”

“I’d take your word for it, you know,” Logan said. 

“I’ve got an ulterior motive for delaying you,” Swann said, and smiled for the first time since they’d entered the room. Suddenly he looked like someone’s grandpa, instead of like someone who could probably order people to drop bombs on countries. Charles could picture him buying his granddaughter a model airplane for Christmas and then helping her put it together. “We want to debrief you. Major Endicott and Captain McKee are with the Army Historical Foundation. I can’t order you to do it, Captain, but if you wouldn’t mind spending the day here, we pretty much just want you to talk our ears off.”

Logan gave Swann a quizzical look, that morphed into a smile and then evolved into a laugh. “Damn! I’m not going to turn down a chance to talk to a bunch of youngsters about what life was like back in my day!”

The room erupted into laughter, especially from the ones with gray hair, and Charles got swept up in the general feeling of camaraderie and laughed along with them.

Erik leaned forward. “Charles wanted to hear more of Logan’s stories. We can stay, right?”

Swann looked at Erik, and Charles caught a sense from Swann’s mind that he was seeing Erik and Charles as people now, rather than just as civilian lawyers who were going to cause a fuss, and said, “Activities that are more than 10 years old are routinely declassified, so it’s fine if Captain Howlett doesn’t mind you being here.”

“They’re great kids, General, let’s keep them around. They might learn something,” Logan said.

Charles would have bristled at being called a kid, but Erik was included in that too.

Captain McKee asked Logan’s permission, and then she set up a video recorder on the table aimed at Logan, opened a laptop and started asking questions.

* * *

The lunch break was a relief. Erik had needed to stand and stretch for an hour now. He’d folded and refolded a piece of paper so many times the seams were worn out, careful to keep his fidgeting under the table, along with his leg bouncing whenever he forgot to pay enough attention to hold still. Even with his ADHD meds, his mind was overflowing with thoughts, stimuli, ideas, the need to move, and the necessity of staying quiet when he kept wanting to interrupt. He got like this when he was expected to sit and concentrate on one thing for very long.

Logan was fascinating; Charles had pretty much given up breathing so he could listen more intently, but input from only one source had never been enough for Erik. Logan was talking; the only input was aural. Erik needed something visual, and something in his hands, and permission to move. Erik concluded in despair that military officers could sit at attention without even twitching for hours at a time. His focus narrowed down to not embarrassing himself.

Lunch was a platter of sandwiches, with General Swann’s apologies that it wasn’t fancier, and Logan’s reassurance that it was better than MREs. They didn’t leave the room to eat, and Erik’s anxiety started to kick in. His anxiety always wound up when he was afraid he was going to do something neurodivergent and then everyone either got really nice about it or sneered at him; he felt like dirt at either reaction. He needed to go somewhere and do something, and it might be weird if he said he was going to go run laps around the building. 

“I left something in the car. Would you all excuse me? I’ll be back soon. Erik, can you come with me?” Charles said, standing up with his sandwich.

Outside? Hell, yeah, Erik was coming with him. He picked up a second sandwich and stood up.

“Can you remember the path to get back here?” Captain McKee asked.

“Fourth door on the right after the second corridor, then bear left three times, brown antechamber, security keypad, hallway and then the reception room,” Erik said.

They all stared at him.

“I have good spatial memory skills,” Erik said. He should have toned that down, but he was desperate to get out of there and didn’t want to wait for someone to draw them a map. Also, he could solve a Rubik’s Cube in less than five minutes. Those skills were related. Really. Could he please leave now? Like, right now?

Seven minutes later, they were outside. The late October air was heavy with the smell of exhaust, since they were in an 8,000 car parking lot. Erik tried to match Charles’ pace, but then he gave up and decided Charles could run if he needed to.

“What is it you needed?” Erik asked, unlocking his Mazda, and turning around to look for Charles.

“Nothing, but it looked like you needed to get out of there,” Charles said, unexpectedly close. He brushed his fingers across his temple. “Mind if I take a look?”

Erik glared at him. He hated it when people got all nice about his ADHD. He wanted to be normal, damn it. “You made that up?”

Charles narrowed his eyes at him. “After everything you’ve done to help me, whether I wanted it or not, you do not get to be pissy about me springing you from that room.”

Oh. Yeah. Good point. “Fine, look.” Erik got in the car and fished a few items out of the glove box to fiddle with for a minute. Oddly, he couldn’t tell that Charles was in his head. “Hey, you in there? I can’t feel anything.”

Charles opened his eyes and took his fingers away from his head. “I can be subtle when I want to be. That’s quite the maelstrom you’ve got whirling around in there. How do you get anything done?”

“Structure. Occupational therapy.” He stopped fiddling and stared at the stuff. “I may not last all afternoon.”

“What if you took notes? That’s movement, plus visual input. Would that help?”

That was a brilliant suggestion, actually. “I need a notebook.”

“Here,” Charles sorted through some of the mess in the back seat and handed him two legal pads. 

One of them had the notes from a deposition he’d conducted six months ago. So that’s where that ended up. Things tended to get lost in Erik’s back seat.

“You ready to go back in?”

In response, Erik started walking back towards the building. Charles fell into step beside him. Charles’ wavy hair, worn long enough to curl around his ears and collar, plus his British accent, made him exotic in this setting full of Americans with military haircuts. Erik looked at the smaller man, crisp and gorgeous in his Italian suit, carrying a leather portfolio, and grinned at him. “Feel like a lawyer?”

“This is pretty fucking awesome, even if we didn’t get to battle the Pentagon.” Charles grinned back at him. 

“Yeah, all the work I put into my speeches, totally wasted.”

“Give me the speech on the ride home; I’ll need a nap by then.”

“Shut up, Charles,” Erik said. Without thinking it through, he put a hand on Charles’ shoulder and shook him.

Charles laughed. Then he put his own hand over Erik’s and pressed down lightly before letting go. Erik squeezed his shoulder again before dropping his hand.

You know, it wasn’t sexual harassment if Charles liked him back.

* * *

The legal pad and pen got Erik through the afternoon, plus the pocket full of paper clips he’d swiped from an unattended desk when he and Charles had walked back in after lunch. He would have filled his pockets with the ball bearings that he kept in his car, but he didn’t want to try and explain it to the MP manning the metal detector.

With something to fidget with, Erik could pay more attention to what Logan was actually saying. There were gaps and skips in some of his narrative. Logan would start out with his personal experiences, share some anecdotes, and then sometimes the story would finish with information that sounded like he was reading Wikipedia. Other stories were told so vividly that Erik felt like he was fighting next to Logan, start to finish. If this was a deposition, Erik would have asked a hundred questions, and then likely exposed Logan as an unreliable witness.

Erik caught Charles' eye and brushed fingertips over his temple. Charles copied the motion. 

_Yes?_

_What's wrong with his memory?_

Charles glanced at Logan for a long second. _It's coming from different places in his mind. That's a bit unusual. Maybe it's his age?_

Erik nodded. It didn't really matter. These were just stories. 

Once Logan’s narrative reached the 1960s, Erik started asking questions too, even though Captain McKee clearly didn’t want him to interrupt.

“So the military didn’t send you in when that riot in Chollas broke out?” Erik asked Logan. 

The 1965 riot in Chollas, Arizona broke out less than a year after Max and Wanda Eisenhardt founded Genosha. The military had been keeping a close eye on the mutant sanctuary, looking for signs of militarization, and building up the Arizona National Guard’s presence in the city. Tensions ramped up fast. It didn’t take long before the Eisenhardts dropped the peaceful facade and let their true intentions be known. Max and Wanda Eisenhardt declared independence from the United States and called all mutants to rally to their banner. Max ripped the town of Chollas, Arizona apart while reality tore at the seams when Wanda Eisenhardt unleashed her powers too. Then they retreated to their stronghold in Genosha. The riot became a siege.

“No mutants got sent in to tangle with Eisenhardt. Top brass didn’t trust us to fight a mutant instead of join him. Stupid on their part,” Logan said. “Most of us didn’t want our own country, just permission to be ourselves in this country. Eisenhardt thought there would be more mutants willing to fight for independence, and there weren’t. It was all they could do to hold on for that year, and that gave the Army time to get some silicon weapons deployed.”

“How did they really stop him?” Erik asked, looking around the room. Logan wouldn’t know the answer, if he hadn’t been at the Siege of Genosha. The story about silicon weapons was what got taught in school history classes, but if you dug in deep, which Erik had, it was clear that the military didn’t have anywhere near enough silicon weapons to take down Eisenhardt and his mutant followers.

“Silicon weapons,” Colonel Jesperson replied. He’d rejoined the group after lunch, along with a bank statement showing Logan’s pension had been fully caught up. 

“When did the military develop enough silicon weapons to take down Eisenhardt? It’s not like they saw him coming,” Erik pressed.

“You’d be surprised how fast we can ramp up production in a crisis,” Captain McKee said. “I did my master’s thesis on weapons production during World War II. It’s quite an impressive feat. The military had the ten months between the riot in Chollas and the final police action against Genosha itself to develop and produce silicon weapons.”

“But there weren’t that many silicon weapons sent in,” Erik insisted. “There were some single-shot rifles and grenade launchers made out of silicon, but anything with real destructive force blows up. Silicon can’t handle the concussive force that metal can, at least not back in the 1960s. The official account is full of holes.”

“You read conspiracy websites, son?” Major Endicott asked. He was as portly as a military man could be, with rosacea making his cheeks red. 

_ Erik, back off. They don’t like the questions you’re asking. _

Erik shook off Charles’ warning. He just wanted to know. He needed to know. Asking questions wasn’t a crime.

“No, I read history books. I know someone who was there.” Erik stopped himself; he probably shouldn’t have said that. “How did you really stop Eisenhardt?”

“You know a survivor from the Siege?” Captain McKee asked.

Major Endicott was typing into his laptop. “Your last name spelled l-e-n-s-h-e-r?”

Erik corrected the spelling and stopped asking questions. His stomach dropped down to his feet and he realized he should have shut up when Charles told him to. He might have set off something he couldn’t deal with, if the military connected some dots about him. It made him so metal-breaking furious that he wasn’t allowed to know the truth. Erik wrapped his hands around those poor paperclips and concentrated hard on not destroying anything else.

Captain McKee launched into some of the basic history about Max and Wanda Eisenhardts’ uprising, which Erik had heard in high school history class and not believed at that point either. The official account was that Max Eisenhardt refused to surrender after Wanda committed suicide, and his stubbornness dragged out the battle for more than a month. The thing was, if you dug into the details, Eisenhardt disappeared from the battlefield when his wife died, and that was five weeks before the United States declared victory. During those five weeks, ninety percent of the mutant population of Genosha was killed. Anywhere else, that would have been considered a war crime, but the historians classified every single mutant in Genosha as a combatant and claimed minimal collateral damage.

Humans believed the official account. Mutants claimed that the military committed battlefield genocide. 

“What have you got there?” Major Endicott interrupted Captain McKee to ask Erik.

Erik followed Endicott’s gaze, and realized he’d brought his handful of paperclips out from under the table and was fidgeting with them in plain sight. He’d reshaped them into a metal sheet with a lever to bend with his thumb. “Nothing,” Erik said, and put the gadget beneath the table again.

“You a mutant?” Endicott asked.

Erik glared at the tabletop. Charles didn’t say anything either.

“Sure they are. That’s why they help other mutants for free,” Logan chimed in. “That one’s a telepath. He’s helping out a friend of mine with her powers,” Logan said with a nod towards Charles. “What is it you can do, Erik?”

“A telepath!” Endicott almost shouted.

“I follow the Casey-Kenton Standards for the Ethical Use of Telepathy,” Charles protested at the implied accusation. He looked around at the military men and women and licked his lips nervously. “Erik’s telekinetic, but only with small objects, like wires and such.” 

“There’s nothing wrong with being a mutant,” Swann said, looking at Endicott.

“Sir, a word with you in private,” Endicott replied, getting to his feet.

“Certainly. Let’s take a ten minute break,” Swann said.

Endicott turned such a ferocious look of warning on Charles that he literally shrank away from the man, and Erik leaned over to put an arm over the back of Charles’ chair and stoneface Endicott.

Captain McKee tried to smooth over the tension left in the room after Swann and Endicott walked out by returning to the history lesson. “It was after the Eisenhardt incident that the military made its foray into weaponizing mutant abilities. I believe the military concluded that we’d rather have power like that working for us instead of against us the next time.” Captain McKee tried to smile, but it fell flat.

“The military should have picked someone other than Stryker to lead the mutant unit,” Logan said.

“Who was it that infused your skeleton with adamantium?” Erik asked.

“Stryker.” Logan got enough hatred and disgust into that one word to be its own weapon.

“His actions have been disavowed by the military,” Colonel Jesperson said, as if that somehow made everything alright.

“Hanging him out to dry afterwards doesn’t change the fact that Stryker had the military’s full support for everything he did when he was doing it, including turning his own son over for blocking experimentation,” Logan said. He kept his voice even, but the neutral tone couldn’t lessen the impact of the words. Erik wondered at Logan’s ability to keep his temper in check; he would have been weaponizing paperclips by now if it had been him. The wad of metal that used to be paperclips turned into a tiny dagger.

“Erik, could I have a word with you in private?” Swann asked, coming back into the room with Endicott behind him.

What else could he do but agree? Endicott was aiming a glare at Charles that was making him squirm again. No way was he leaving Charles in the same room with Endicott. He stood up, and wrapped a hand around Charles’ arm, pulling him to his feet as well. “Sure.”

“I meant alone,” Swann said. 

“This is my attorney,” Erik said, straight-faced.

“You want him in the conversation, he takes a suppressant,” Endicott said.

“Endicott!” Swann barked at him.

“Comment withdrawn,” Endicott said stiffly.

“I just asked how the military really ended the Siege of Genosha,” Erik said evenly, fighting his temper. “You said everything gets declassified after ten years; why can’t you just answer the question?”

“Not everything. Activities can remain classified if determined necessary after review. Activities surrounding the Siege of Genosha are still classified.” Swann turned to look at Charles.

“I am not in your head,” Charles insisted. He’d shaken off Erik’s hand and had smoothed out his face into a professionally polite demeanor.

“How would we know?” Endicott demanded. 

Endicott shot a warning look at Swann, who gave the smallest shake of his head. Endicott sat down and started writing. 

“Chuck’s a good kid,” Logan said. “Both of them are. They came to help me get my pension, not to dig up dirt you want to keep buried. Back off a bit, eh?”

Logan stayed seated, a half-smile determinedly fixed to his face, but Erik could feel the adamantium shifting beneath his skin. Logan had his hands balled into fists, the tips of the blades close to breaking the skin.

Swann took the opening Logan offered. “Yes, this is just about Howlett’s pension. Charles, it’s nothing about your mutation at all, but I do need to talk to Erik in private for just a minute. Would you mind waiting here with Logan? I believe Captain McKee wanted to get started on his activities during the Vietnam War, and if we’re going to finish this session before 5:00 p.m., we need to keep going.”

“Of course, yes,” Charles said.

After that, Erik couldn’t insist that Charles come with him. He settled for smiling at Endicott, which had the desired effect and he sat down as far away from Charles as he could get. 

Swann led Erik down a short hallway to an office with a blank nameplate. It looked like the room was being used to store extra office furniture. Swann pulled out a swivel chair and gestured towards another one. Erik sat down.

“You said you knew someone at the Siege of Genosha. Who was it?” Swann’s kept his voice conversational, as if they were just getting to know each other.

“I knew someone who visited Genosha. She left before anything happened,” Erik said.

“Mm-hmm.”

There was a pause as Erik didn’t volunteer any more information, and Swann decided not to press the point.

“What was it you were holding? Endicott asked about it.”

Erik put his hand in his pocket and drew out the metal, quickly reforming it into a gadget, and pressing the imprint of a toy company into a corner. He hated talking about his ADHD, but it was better than talking about his connection to the Siege of Genosha, and would be a way to deflect questions about his mutation. “It’s, um, kind of embarrassing, sir, but I have ADHD. This is just a way to fidget without disturbing other people. I usually keep it under the table.” Erik handed the gadget to Swann. It was a square with a lever that could be flipped or pressed.

“That got through the metal detector?”

“Uh, yeah, I just put it in the tray with my wallet and explained what it was for,” Erik said, blinking fast the way he did when he lied.

“Mm-hmm.”

Erik broke out into a sweat.

“Telekinetic?”

“Yes, sir.” Erik made the gadget float out of Swann’s hand and over to the table. 

Swann watched it. “I’ve got a nephew with ADHD. I’ll have to tell him about you. You must have done well in school to get to law school. Impressive accomplishment,” Swann said, getting to his feet.

“My grades sucked, actually, I barely graduated,” Erik said, picking up the gadget and also getting to his feet, so relieved that the interview was over that he dropped his guard too soon and smiled at Swann.

“What was your mother’s maiden name?” Swann asked.

This is why he should never make eye contact, Erik thought as his mind shorted out and he blinked so fast that his eyelashes fluttered. “Uh, Smith.”

Swann held out his hand and Erik automatically took it to shake it. Swann took the gadget from him, which was now a lump of metal with the imprint of Erik’s thumb in it. He pocketed it before Erik could do anything and got the door for Erik. “Good thing Howlett met up with you. This has been the most interesting day at the office this year,” Swann said as they walked back down the hallway. He slapped Erik’s shoulder with a friendly smile.

Erik smiled back weakly, and reshaped the lump of metal in Swann’s pocket back into the gadget with the lever.

They rejoined the group as Logan was telling the story about finding the adamantium meteorite, and then about the betrayal and deceit Stryker used to manipulate him into agreeing to have his skeleton infused. Charles looked over when he and Swann rejoined the group. Erik nodded back at him. 

At the end of the day, Lt. General Swann gave a business card with his personal cell phone number on it to Logan, Charles and Erik. He accidentally dropped the card he was handing to Erik. Every nerve ending in his body tingled with anxiety as Erik leaned over to pick up the card off the carpet with his fingers. He couldn’t keep himself from glancing at Swann as he straightened back up, and wished he was a telepath so he could tell what Swann was thinking behind that blank expression.


	9. Erik's Parents

It was full dark when the three of them finally left the Pentagon. Charles was mentally and emotionally drained. He had gotten spoiled by the two months he’d spent in Avalon with so many other mutants and had forgotten the kicked-in-the-stomach feeling of knowing someone disliked him just because he was a telepath. He’d told the truth when he said he hadn’t been fishing in anyone’s head that day. But that hadn’t stopped the suspicion dripping from Endicott’s mind. When Erik and Swann returned from their private talk, Swann was thinking insignificant thoughts with too much concentration, as if he knew distraction was a better way to keep a telepath away than outright shielding. Charles never pried, but he couldn’t stop himself from knowing more than he should.

Logan’s stories had been exciting and then appalling. Charles hadn’t known any of the details about how Logan had gotten an adamantium skeleton, and nothing at all about Stryker shooting Logan in the head to destroy his memories. The cold-bloodedness of it chilled him to the bone. Charles wanted to think well of the world, but sometimes events shook his assurance. He identified with Logan’s story because any form of mental destruction reminded him of what his mother had done to him. Sometimes, he thought Eisenhardt’s idea of a separate country for a mutant sanctuary had some merit to it; the man had just gone about it all wrong.

They had a three hour drive ahead of them. Charles got in the back seat again, insisting to Logan that Logan needed the extra leg room in the front seat more than Charles did, loosened his tie and set down his leather portfolio. He leaned his head back and closed his eyes, drowsing off in the pleasant company of two minds that he liked. 

Charles woke up when they pulled into a driveway. He couldn’t possibly have slept for more than three hours.

“Where are we?” Logan asked.

“My parents’ house,” Erik replied. “They said we can stay overnight.”

“Why are we doing that?” Logan asked, while Charles rubbed his eyes.

“Charles said he wanted to meet my mom. They said it’s fine if you’re here too,” said Erik. He pulled a small round piece of cloth out of the glove box and settled it on his head as he got out of the car.

Charles was abruptly wide awake.

Logan turned around. “Shit, sorry, kid, I didn’t know you guys were at that point in your relationship. I don’t mean to be a third wheel.”

Why did everyone assume he was dating Erik when they’d barely managed to hold hands? “It’s fine,” he hurried to assure Logan. He’d said he wanted to meet Erik’s mom. He remembered saying it, and he shouldn’t have assumed that Erik would know that he hadn’t meant he wanted to meet Erik’s mom two days later without any advance warning.

Erik got the door for him, he even used his hands instead of his power. Damn, maybe they were dating. They ate together all the time. Is that why Erik thought they were dating? Charles had rather thought he was Erik’s service project. Was he really a boyfriend? Shouldn’t he know things like that? Damn the Casey-Kenton Standards for the Ethical Use of Telepathy.

Charles looked up into Erik’s eyes as he got out of the car. He could tell Erik was all kinds of nervous, but he was making eye contact with Charles anyway. He smiled at Erik, and Erik grinned in relief, the customary goodwill flooding Charles’ mind. 

It just now occurred to Charles that the goodwill was really affection.

* * *

The first surprise about Edie and Jakob Lehnsherr was how old they were. Edie’s hair was white, and Jakob had the sagging neck and spotted hands of an elderly man. If Charles had to guess, he would say they were in their seventies. That would mean Erik would have been born when Edie was in her early forties, and he was an only child. There must be a story there, but there was no polite way to ask about it.

Edie stared at Logan with a wash of recognition so strong that Charles felt it through his shields, and then shook her head and apologized for staring. “You look like someone I met once, that’s all. Beg pardon. Do come in!”

The home had an open floor plan for the dining and living room. Edie ushered them into the living room. When they passed the dining table, Charles commented on the taper candles burning in intricate silver candlesticks.

“Erik made our Shabbat candlesticks,” Jakob said proudly.

“Oh!” Charles had noticed Jakob was wearing the same circle of cloth on his head that Erik had put on in the car. Yarmulkes. Add Shabbat candlesticks to that and . . . “Erik, you never said you were Jewish!”

Erik shrugged. “It doesn’t come up much.”

Jakob clucked his tongue. “Next week is Yom Kippur.”

Erik shrugged again. “It comes up then.”

“You be home _ before _ we light the candles next week,” Jakob chided him.

“Don’t pick at him, Jakob, we’re happy to see him whenever he comes home,” Edie said, patting Erik just above the elbow, which was as high as she could easily reach. Erik put an arm around her shoulders and she leaned her cheek briefly against his chest. Edie wasn’t shielding. Charles’ shields blocked out words, but he could clearly feel Edie’s fear and concern for her son, at odds with her expression, which was nothing but love.

She let go of him with another pat. “I made cookies.” 

Jakob Lehnsherr handed out bottled beer and Edie set out a plate of homemade chocolate chip cookies before sitting back down next to Charles and smiling at him. She reminded Charles of a bird, delicate and breakable, but beautiful enough you hoped she would stay close. There was a lot of yearning tied up in Edie’s emotional state. Edie wanted things she couldn’t have; the disappointment had braided itself into her life so thoroughly that sadness tinged every emotion, even love. 

The conversation meandered through small talk, mostly propelled by Logan’s questions. Charles was too nervous about meeting the parents of the man he didn’t know whether or not he was dating to fall into his customary chatty mode and put everyone at ease. Did Erik think they were dating because Charles was the only person who talked to him regularly? Was this whole misunderstanding Charles’ fault? Why wouldn’t Erik _ say _something about them? If only Logan would ask Erik how long they’d been dating, Erik might say something and then Charles would have a clue as to what the hell was going on between them.

“Life takes you by surprise sometimes,” Jakob was saying, after describing meeting Edie at synagogue and the long process of persuading her to marry him. He raised his bottle in Erik’s direction. “You spend your whole life wondering if God has forgotten you, and then you get the greatest blessing of your life. We might know a bit about how Sarah and Abraham felt.”

The feeling radiating off Jakob’s mind was security and peace at a depth Charles didn’t think he’d ever sensed before. However, Jakob’s feelings towards his wife and son were very familiar to Charles; it was the same goodwill that Erik felt for him. He took a swallow of his beer to calm his nerves and then coughed. That was love? All that warmth and goodwill was love? On one level, Charles knew his mother didn’t love him, but this proof saddened him. He’d never felt anything like that from her.

He was so wrapped up in his own thoughts that he almost missed the flash of guilt and turmoil from Edie’s mind. Jakob had turned to smile softly at her, inviting her to share in his proclamation of divine blessing. Edie made eye contact only briefly, and didn’t return the smile. Charles didn’t know if it was because Edie didn’t believe in God, or didn’t believe having a son so late in life was a blessing. But there was definitely something there that didn’t match Jakob’s serenity.

“No baby stories, okay dad?” Erik asked.

Jakob laughed and turned to Charles. “How do you like being a lawyer?” 

“Oh, it’s . . .” dreadful, really, is what Charles didn’t say. “Different than I expected, but it’s been marvelous working with Erik.” Jakob looked proudly at his son. 

“Your son is a cut above the ordinary,” Logan said to Jakob. “When someone told me there was a lawyer willing to help mutants for free, I didn’t believe it. It took me a month before I decided I had nothing left to lose and I may as well ask him for help.” Even after all the stories Logan had told today, it appeared he had one more left. He spun a good yarn about meeting Erik and Charles, and just a few weeks later, he now had enough money to buy a house. “I’m going to research school districts. I got a kid staying with me who needs to finish high school, and now I can get her back into school,” Logan finished.

“Logan took in a mutant girl who ran away from home when her mutation caused problems,” Charles added, to keep the Lehnsherrs from thinking the wrong thing about Logan living with a girl who was still in high school.

“Charles is going to help her learn to control her mutation so she can be around people without hurting them,” Logan said.

“You can do that?” Edie asked, wide-eyed. The yearning flared into hope.

“I’m going to find out if I can do that,” Charles said, and chuckles went around the group. 

Edie reached over and patted his arm. “You can help Erik too, can’t you?” 

Charles was surprised to see tears in her eyes, the easy tears of an elderly woman whose emotions spilled over more often than she would like. Her feelings were at the very top of her mind, fear and hope mingled strongly.

“We all have to learn to control our mutations,” Erik said before Charles could ask what sort of help Erik needed with his weak telekinesis, “I mean, any mutant could hurt someone else without meaning to, right?”

“That’s right, Erik, everyone has a responsibility to make sure he doesn’t hurt anyone else,” Jakob said.

The question and response had the feel of a longstanding conversation. 

“Be a better world if everyone did that,” Logan observed, finishing off another cookie in two bites. The plate of cookies was empty, and Charles had only had one. He scowled in Logan’s direction.

“Everyone just has to do their best and be careful,” Edie said, with a look at Erik.

Again, this sounded like a dialogue rehearsed and polished and aimed at Erik.

Erik was nodding. He was sitting next to his father, and Jakob reached out to squeeze Erik’s shoulder wordlessly. Charles wondered what they would have said if he and Logan weren’t here. He wondered why Mr. and Mrs. Lehnsherr were so concerned about Erik’s weak telekinesis. Perhaps worrying was just something normal parents did.

“Who told you about me?” Erik asked Logan. “I thought you just found me on the Internet.”

“Hey, I can afford Internet now!” Logan said with a grin before answering the question. “The doctor told me about you. I had to ask him if he’d treat Marie for free. I took her in right after I picked her up. She was in a bad way. I told him a bit about why I couldn’t pay him, and he printed your form off the Internet for me. I’m going to have to tell him that you’ve got a partner who can help kids with dangerous mutations. I bet he’ll pass that on!”

Charles blushed because Logan said ‘partner’ instead of ‘law partner,’ and Edie turned an adoring gaze on him, which made him blush harder. He wanted to get the conversation off his theoretical relationship with Erik. “You know a doctor willing to treat someone with a dangerous mutation?”

Logan shrugged. “He’s pretty dangerous himself. Big blue guy. Hank McCoy. You get sick, that’s where you go.”

“There aren’t very many mutant doctors, are there?” Edie commented.

“There’s discrimination in the medical school admissions process,” Erik said. “My neighbor had to fight for three years just to get in, and her MCAT scores were in the 90th percentile.”

“Is that Magda?” Charles asked. Magda was the only person he had heard Erik mention outside of the office and his parents. She came up occasionally, and when Erik said Magda said something, it had the force of law. 

“Magda’s a human,” Erik said. “My neighbor is Jean Grey. She’s telepathic and telekinetic both.”

“Damn,” Logan said. 

“Impressive,” Charles said.

“Do you know Magda?” Jakob asked Charles.

“No, I’ve just heard Erik talk about her. Who is she?”

“My friend,” Erik said at the same time Jakob said, “Erik’s therapist.”

Erik scowled at his dad. “I can have a friend who’s a therapist.”

“I’ll get some more cookies,” Edie said, to smooth over the awkward moment. She produced an entire container of chocolate chip cookies.

“These are really good!” Charles enthused, taking two before Logan could grab another handful.

“They’re Erik’s favorite. I made them when he called yesterday to say he was coming with some guests tonight. Have another, you could certainly use some fattening up,” Edie said, patting Charles’ shoulder.

“Mom!” Erik said, embarrassed.

This was how parents were supposed to work, Charles thought to himself. She handed him another cookie and an adoring smile. _ Please help my son. _ Charles understood the words, but not the meaning of the message, the desperation underlying the thought so at odds with the cheerful smile on her face. Erik was the one who kept helping him, not the other way around.

* * *

Erik shut the conversation with Swann out of his head once he got home. Home was a relaxing place, and what happened with Swann had no place here. He’d always been good at compartmentalizing upsetting events; it was a survival skill for someone who was usually the cause of the upsetting event. 

His mom loved Charles already, he could tell by the way she fussed over him. Two days ago, when Charles had talked about his mother having him blocked, Erik decided that the solution to Charles’ pain would be to introduce him to his own mom. Charles looked a little dazed at all the maternal attention, but he would get used to it. His dad was a little more reserved, and Charles would have to learn about car engines and tools, but that would work out fine too.

After the candles had been put out and everyone was sorting themselves out for bed, Erik realized he probably should have warned Logan and Charles ahead of time that they were staying overnight. No one had a toothbrush, or a change of clothes, though Erik did like the way Charles looked when he borrowed Erik’s clothes, with the sleeves of his sweatshirt falling down over his hands. He looked at him fondly, and resisted the urge to brush that lock of floppy hair off his forehead. That lock of hair was always falling down to Charles’ eyebrows, heedless of Erik’s constant impulse to brush it back, and then run fingers through all that wavy mahogany hair.

Logan got the guest bedroom, which doubled as his father’s office. His mom looked at them like she wanted to ask awkward questions about sleeping arrangements, but then his dad put an arm around her shoulders and said Erik and Charles could figure it out on their own, and she should come to bed.

His parents thought they were officially dating, and Erik hadn’t told them otherwise. Any dating was a long way out, when he was no longer Charles’ supervisor. That meant they had to sleep apart. That was too bad, but Erik was nothing like Shaw. Besides, it would be downright creepy to have his parents across the hall on their first night together.

Erik got a pillow and sheets out of the hallway linen closet. “You take my bedroom. I’ll sleep on the couch.”

“Oh,” Charles said.

Erik shook out a sheet and wondered what Charles meant by saying ‘oh.’ Charles knew they weren’t dating. They hadn’t gone on a date, for one thing. Buying breakfast for Charles wasn’t a date because they didn’t kiss afterwards. They were just friends. Magda said that if he wanted a real relationship that would last, then he should be friends before having sex. So far, he had helped Charles a lot, told him he had ADHD, and introduced him to his parents. Everything was going really well and Charles was the best friend Erik had ever had. He was on the right track, and he wasn’t going to ruin things by hitting on him. 

“Do you need anything?” Erik asked. 

“No, it’s all fine. Everything’s fine,” Charles said.

Erik wondered if that meant everything was fine, or if he ought to know something wasn’t fine. Should he ask more questions? Sometimes, asking questions until he understood something annoyed the other person, especially if a neurotypical person would already know the answer. Should he take Charles’ answer at face value? Sometimes, believing what someone said caused a problem too. 

Erik did what he typically did when the situation confused him and disengaged.

“Good night, Charles,” he said.

“Good night, Erik,” Charles said. He went into Erik’s bedroom and left the door open.

From his place on the couch in the living room, Erik could see the open door. Was it an invitation? Or a test? What if he went through that open door and Charles shifted over in Erik’s bed and Erik could slide in next to him and wrap his arms around that slim body and bury his face in the hollow of Charles’ throat? What if Charles hooked a leg around Erik’s body to draw him closer and his fingers buried themselves in Erik’s hair? What if? 

Erik kept his shields up, so Charles wouldn’t hear something he didn’t want to know.

* * *

His mom made french toast with homemade maple-butter syrup for breakfast the next morning when Erik told her how much Charles liked eating breakfast. She’d given up on getting Erik to eat breakfast when he was a teenager. He stood there with an adoring grin on his face, watching his mom place another slice of french toast onto Charles’ plate and refill his orange juice. It was so homey and comfortable and perfect, like Charles was already part of the family.

He was even still wearing Erik’s sweatshirt and a pair of old jeans with the cuffs rolled up because he hadn’t brought anything to wear besides his Italian suit. Yeah, next time Erik planned an overnighter, he really ought to tell Charles ahead of time.

“I convinced him to eat pancakes,” Charles said as he ate, since they were discussing Erik’s breakfast habits, or lack thereof. “We have breakfast together every Wednesday, and I told him I couldn’t eat the American equivalent of a full English breakfast while all he did was sip at a kale smoothie.”

“Well, he must love you very much if he’s willing to eat breakfast just to spend time with you,” his mom said.

Erik and Charles froze simultaneously.

Charles recovered first, swallowed, and then set down his napkin with an air of determination. “Erik hasn’t asked me on a date, and I haven’t asked him. As far as I know, we aren’t dating.” He gave Erik a very direct look and Erik suddenly realized he had fucked up.

“But you’re all he talks about!” his mom said.

“Mom!” Erik said, aggrieved.

“Why haven’t you asked him out yet?” his mom demanded, rounding on him. Perhaps there was a down side to his mom immediately loving Charles, if it meant she was going to take Charles’ side.

“I’m his supervisor! It would be sexual harassment if I asked him out!”

“Is that the issue? Bloody hell, Erik! Beg your pardon, Edie.”

“I’m not dating you while I’m your supervisor,” Erik said stubbornly. “It’s wrong.”

“Charles, are you finished? Come on out.” Jakob opened the back door and stuck his head into the kitchen. He’d taken Logan out to the car shop and garage that dominated the backyard to show Logan the 1956 Ford F100 that Jakob was restoring, telling Charles he had to come out as soon as he was done eating. 

“We’re having a discussion, dear,” Edie said to her husband.

“We’ll finish it in private,” Charles said immediately. “Thanks for breakfast, Edie.”

Edie caught Erik’s sleeve when he tried to follow them. Chastened, Erik began clearing the table as soon as she let go. Sometimes if he was helpful, his mom wouldn’t pursue awkward conversations. 

No such luck today.

“You said he was your boyfriend! You said he’d asked to meet me!” His mom poked him in the ribs.

“He did ask to meet you,” Erik said, panicking because he was pretty sure he’d gotten this wrong. “And he’s the closest I’ve gotten to a boyfriend in a long time. We just haven’t really talked about it yet. Guys don’t talk about stuff, mom, not like that.”

“What’s this about sexual harassment?”

“I’m his supervisor! You remember the MeToo movement! I can’t ask him out! I only held his hand the one time because he was crying. And that time I had to carry him was because he’d collapsed when he tried to help Logan’s friend.” Erik started running water to rinse off the plates, wishing he would shut up. Impulse control issues were the death of discretion. 

“You _ carried _ him?”

“We were at the Pentagon yesterday,” Erik threw out, desperate to change the subject.

It worked. His mom set down a stack of coffee mugs on the counter with a clatter.

The rules were that Erik avoided the military, never got in trouble with the police, never used his power in anything besides the smallest ways, and never asked questions about his maternal grandparents. 

“We took Logan there to get his pension. Remember I told you about his pension?” Erik had told his parents about helping Logan get his pension, but he hadn’t mentioned the trip to the Pentagon.

“Erik,” his mom said, somewhere between deadly quiet and completely heartbroken.

The frustration that had compelled Erik to start asking questions at the Pentagon when he knew he should have kept quiet bubbled up again. “It can’t be wrong to know, mom! He’s my grandfather, and I’ve got the same mutation he does. Secrets aren’t going to change who I am!”

“Sweetie, it’s the past. Let it stay in the past!” His mom shut off the water to pull him into a hug, tugging him down to press their foreheads together the way she used to do when he was little. His mom wished he hadn’t grown up; Erik knew that. He looked just like his grandfather, even a schoolteacher who had no idea about their connection had commented once on the resemblance between Max Eisenhardt and Erik. “It’s dangerous! Nothing good can come from raking up all the terrible things they did.”

This was the heart of all his mom’s prohibitions: Max and Wanda Eisenhardt were terrible people. But how could terrible people have a daughter like Edie?

The thing was, the more Erik studied history and the persecution of mutants, the more he was convinced that his grandparents hadn’t cornered the market on terrible. Just listening to Logan talk about Stryker yesterday was enough to prove that. Edie would never listen to stories of mutant persecution though. She turned the channel when reports came on the news, and refused to read anything on the Internet. It made Erik crazy. Maybe Edie had seen enough by the time she was 24 years old and her father died to make her hide from the world for the rest of her life, but he couldn’t hide with her any longer.

Jakob was caught between them, just wishing his two favorite people could smooth out this one issue.

“They had good ideas, mom. Don’t you remember anything about what they said? They just wanted a safe place! They just wanted to be left alone!” This was the point that infuriated Erik. Why couldn’t the United States just leave them alone? The riot in Chollas and the Siege of Genosha were caused by U.S. military action. The Eisenhardts didn’t leave Genosha to attack anyone. There was precedent for what the Eisenhardts wanted. Native American reservations were carve-outs in U.S. sovereignty. Why not one of those for mutants? Why _not_ Genosha? Why couldn’t his mom look at the idea without curling up in revulsion?

“Erik! Don’t! Don’t risk it. My only child! I couldn’t live if anything happened to you!” 

Erik couldn’t deal with tears, especially not the tears of his frail, elderly mother who was essentially begging him to keep himself safe. He wiped his hands on a dish towel and hugged her. “Mom, don’t cry, don’t. I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“They blocked him! They took my father and he never used his power again. He died the day his power disappeared, even though he lived another eight years. They would block you too! If anyone in the military knew you were metallokinetic, they would block you in an instant. You wouldn’t have any rights! My father fought it all the way to the Supreme Court, and that’s what they said! Oh, Erik!”

This was more than his mom had ever told him. Erik had always known that the rules she wrapped him in were based on the fear of what had happened to Max Eisenhardt, but she had never talked about the specifics.

Erik wanted to reassure her that the worst would never happen, even if he revealed his abilities. “Blocking is different now. They’ve fixed a lot of the problems. Charles is blocked, and he said it isn’t as bad . . .”

He was interrupted by Edie’s horrified gasp. “Charles! Even that nice boy!”

“I shouldn’t have said that. It’s a secret. Don’t tell him I told you, please mom!”

“Ohhh! They’ll come for you too! Just like my father!”

“Mom!” Erik tightened his arm about her waist and took hold of her elbow. She was starting to collapse. Sometimes she got like this. She had medication, but sometimes they had to go to the hospital. “Mom, I’m going to help you into bed, and then go get dad, okay? Nod if you understand.”

His mom nodded, and Erik thought that there was nothing in the world worse than a sobbing elderly woman, especially knowing it was all his fault. “Put your arms around my neck, mom, I’m going to carry you.” She wouldn’t be able to handle the stairs in this condition.

Erik got his mom settled into bed and spread a blanket over her. He got her a glass of water and her sedatives. If there was any way to avoid telling his dad about this, he would have, but if he didn’t tell his dad now, he’d just get caught later, and then his dad would be ‘disappointed’ in him, which was about as bad as sending his mom into an anxiety attack.

Out in the shop, Logan was up to his elbows in the Mustang’s engine and his dad was wiping his hands on a greasy cloth. Charles was standing to the side, a look of polite interest on his face. He was the first to look over at Erik.

“Dad? Mom’s not feeling well.”

Jakob handed the greasy rag to Charles and brushed past Erik in his hurry.

“I’m sorry, Dad.” Erik followed his dad out of the shop, leaving Charles and Logan with the gutted Mustang.

* * *

“They’re really nice people, aren’t they?” Charles ventured after a few moments of silence.

“You seemed kinda surprised to find out you were dating,” Logan commented.

Charles gave him a half-smile. “Erik has a few communication issues.”

Logan laughed out loud, folding his arms over his chest and leaning back against the chassis. “I know her from somewhere. Edie. I know her.”

“Oh?” Charles asked politely.

Logan sighed. “This happens sometimes. I got patches of my memories back, decades after Stryker shot me. Some brain doc explained it - memories get coded in more than one location. I spent about four years in the early aughts in an ongoing mental breakdown when most of the memories came back, but I didn’t get all of them back. Some things I don’t remember until a trigger sets off a memory. Anyway, I know I’ve seen Edie before, and it wasn’t a casual encounter. Kinda bugging me I can’t remember it.”

Well, that explained the odd way memories were structured in Logan’s brain. Charles had been careful not to look at the memories themselves without Logan’s permission when he had been talking to the Pentagon, but he had sensed the unusual memory patterns. “Could you ask her?”

“I don’t think she’d want to remember it. I remember that much. Scared girl who was trying to shut out the whole world. Marie reminds me of her: same age, afraid of everything.” Logan picked up a spanner and smacked it into his hands. “Erik wanted to know more about the Siege of Genosha yesterday.”

“Yes, you said you weren’t there.”

“No, I said the military didn’t send any mutants to Genosha to fight Eisenhardt. You’re a lawyer; you should have picked up on that split hair.” Logan grinned at Charles. “I wasn’t going to tell the Pentagon shit they didn’t want to hear. I’ve lived long enough to learn a few things, you know? I wasn’t there when Genosha fell and Eisenhardt got captured. I was there before that. I just got curious and went to see,” Logan said.

“You should tell Erik. He would be very interested.”

“Yeah, I will. Give us something to talk about on the drive home. Unless you two want to discuss your relationship. I can pretend to sleep.” Logan gave him a cheeky grin.

“Oh no, you talk as much as you want.” Charles held up his hands and took a step back, grinning. 

The conversation moved on to Marie’s schooling, and getting Logan a realtor to look for a house. It was a nice reminder that sometimes life handed you happy surprises.

* * *

The ride home went past like a snap of the fingers, once Logan started talking about Genosha. Erik asked all the questions he’d stored up over the years, and never once did Logan say it was wrong to ask. 

“I only met Max a few times; he was busy every minute of every day, it seemed. I talked to Wanda more. She was pretty down-to-earth for someone who got nicknamed a witch. Scary powers; nice lady. She knew how people felt about her powers, even other mutants, so I guess she kept a low profile to not scare people away. It gave her time to talk to me,” Logan explained. “I told her a few things about military tactics; nothing classified. I didn’t tell them I was Special Forces. I didn’t even have the enhanced claws at the time. I left before the military offensive started. Why did I leave? I don’t even remember why I left.”

Exactly, that was exactly Erik’s opinion too. Max and Wanda were decent people caught in a terrible situation. Logan was probably the only person still alive, besides his mom, who had known them personally, and he didn’t think they were evil.

“It was a sanctuary. Genosha was a mutant sanctuary. Everyone says the Eisenhardts wanted to wipe baselines off the earth, but really Genosha was just a sanctuary. Right?” Erik asked Logan.

“Started that way, I guess. Wanda wanted the sanctuary. I think Max changed his mind eventually. You have to be strong enough to make people leave you alone -- that’s how the thinking went,” Logan said.

“Did Mrs. Eisenhardt think they could win a battle with the military?” Charles asked, and Erik was glad he hadn’t called her ‘Wanda the Witch.’ 

“She had a pretty realistic idea of what might happen,” Logan said. “Neither one of them came across as fanatics. I was surprised to hear that they dragged the battle out as long as they did. They didn’t seem the sort to keep people fighting once it was just a suicide mission.”

“What kind of military abilities did the mutants have?” Erik asked.

“Didn’t they have a daughter?” Charles interrupted. “Did she survive? You never hear anything about the daughter.”

Logan made a sharp noise, somewhere between a gasp and a cry that he choked off quickly.

“It doesn’t matter about the daughter,” Erik said doggedly. “What were the mutants’ military abilities? Eisenhardt was gone from the fight for five weeks before the fighting was over. The U.S. military had their full arsenal, and no one using metal against them for more than a month. Who was fighting that could hold off the U.S. military for five weeks? Physical abilities like quick reflexes wouldn’t have been enough, and that’s about 60% of mutants right there. Who was fighting the military after Eisenhardt disappeared?”

Erik kept talking. He knew all sorts of things about the weapons that were there, and the limits of ordinary telekinesis against explosives and bullets. What had the U.S. military done for five weeks if they weren’t fighting mutants? And if they were fighting mutants, who held them off for five weeks if it wasn’t Eisenhardt?

“Erik,” Charles said.

Erik kept talking, half his concentration on the freeway and the rest on putting words to everything in his head. His therapist called it perseverating. He was spilling every detail he knew about the fight that ended the Siege of Genosha. If he could pour enough of it out, maybe Logan could make sense of it for him.

“Erik, something’s wrong with Logan.” This time, Charles reached up from the back seat and shook Erik’s shoulder.

“What?” Erik turned to look, and something was very wrong. Logan was hyperventilating, hands in fists and writhing like he was fighting something that wasn’t there. It looked like he was in the grip of a terrible nightmare.

“Pull over!” Charles shouted. “He’s going to . . .”

Logan sprang his claws and demolished the windshield with a roar. Erik swerved over two lanes of I-95 to the shoulder of the road, accompanied by horns honking and cars braking to avoid them. Logan was already out of the car, leaping from the dashboard.

“Charles!”

“He can’t deal with what he’s remembering!” Charles cried out, hands to his temple. “I can’t buffer the memory for him!”

Erik got out of the car and ran a few steps towards the trees at the side of the road, where Logan had disappeared. He hadn’t gone far; Erik could hear him. The cries were guttural and sickening.

“He’s calming down. Leave him his space.” Charles had his eyes closed. “It’s just a memory,” Charles was whispering, brow wrinkled with concentration. “It’s just a memory and it can’t hurt you. You’re safe and she’s safe.” 

There wasn’t anything for Erik to do but stand there and watch Charles work with his connection to Logan to calm him down and bring him back. A helpful motorist pulled over, and Erik waved him off. It took about twenty minutes before Logan made his way out of the trees. Beads of sweat still rolled down his face, breath coming in gasps. He leaned on the hood, hands on his knees, and took deep breaths for a few minutes. Charles took his fingers off his temple.

Logan looked over at Charles with the sort of fake grin people wear when something terrible has happened but they’re trying to act like everything is fine. “The good news is that now I know why Erik’s mom is so familiar.”


	10. Edie

Edith Eisenhardt hated Genosha. She hated the trees that twisted up from the reddish sand and produced anemic leaves, so different from the huge leafy crowns of the maples and elms in Brooklyn. She hated the food that tasted of campfire ash and mainly featured canned beans because vegetables died in the ground no matter how much of their precious water they gave them. She even hated the air, so dry it sucked all the hope and moisture out of her lungs every time she took a breath.

“Yes,” was all that Edith said when her mother assigned her to teach some of the younger children. She was 15 years old and should be at the Hannah Abraham High School for Girls in Brooklyn with the three friends she’d known since she was born, but instead she was cobbling together lessons for six children in the one-room schoolhouse. The mutant settlers weren’t bringing many children with them. She was one of twelve teenagers in the entire community.

At least teaching kept her indoors and out of that Arizona sun. The Brooklyn sun was a friend who sharpened shadows and warmed the air in the springtime, tugging off hats to let the wind blow away the last dreariness of winter. The Genoshan sun burned skin to leather and made her squint. She would have wrinkles before she was twenty.

Father was supposed to be happier here, but that hadn’t lasted. Not two months had gone by before Edith was lying awake at night, listening to mother and father fighting on the other side of the sheet metal wall of the shack they lived in. 

“Genosha was meant to be a sanctuary! You agreed it was a sanctuary!” her mother shouted.

“This is only for defense, Wanda. If we can’t defend ourselves, then a sanctuary is no better than a ghetto,” Max argued back.

Mother lost the fight. When new mutants arrived, she still met them to talk about what they could contribute to building a community. Then father met them to talk about what offensive or defensive capabilities their mutations offered, though he had no military experience. Max had been a jeweler in Germany before the Nazis forced him into a ghetto and then a concentration camp, where his first wife and two sons had died. Edith thought about them sometimes, and wished she could ask questions. She had two older brothers, dead before they’d lost their baby teeth, and she knew nothing about them. 

One of the rules was that she could never ask father about the family he’d lost in Germany. They were a mystery, but regardless, she knew she would never live up to the ghosts. Max was the sort of man who should have sons -- strong, tall, strapping young men who would fight alongside him. Instead, he had her, petite and timid.

And, horribly, human.

The two most powerful mutants alive today (that’s what the newspaper article said when they opened Genosha and invited mutants to their sanctuary) had produced a human child. Father never said he was disappointed in her, but he also never said he wasn’t. Edith didn’t ask because it was better to leave the possibility of acceptance there, though it was as dry and desiccated as yucca fruit withered on a parched vine. If she hadn't come to Genosha, she would never have known what her hope looked like.

“Teacher? I’m done. Can I leave now?” Jim pushed his slate onto the rough plank she used as a desk in the school shack. There were several shacks built out of sheet metal in Genosha. Someone in the next county had torn down a warehouse and offered it for free to anyone who could haul it off. Max had made quite a spectacle out of it, back when their neighbors thought mutants were fascinating instead of threatening. Genosha had six sheet metal buildings, which were hot as blazes during the daytime. Everyone else lived in tents. There weren't many building supplies in this treeless desert. Genosha had a paper shortage too, so the children used slates. There was no shortage of slate rock in the desert. Edith had read about school slates in the _ Little House on the Prairie _ books. She brought the precious series to school one book at a time and read chapters to the children to try and make their primitive settlement into an adventure rather than an ordeal. Edith envied Laura Ingalls Wilder, who had a happy father who carved her a doll and brought her hoarhound candy when he went into town.

Jim’s freckles splattered his cheeks like the stars in Genosha’s endless night sky. His bowl-cut hair was mudbrown. Or that was the color of mud in Brooklyn, where the dirt was a proper color. There wasn’t any red in his hair color, so it wasn’t the color of Genoshan mud. Jim was too young to manifest as a mutant, but his father could generate heat and his mother had mutant-fast reflexes and increased strength. They’d arrived six months ago.

Edith set him free and he clattered out of the schoolhouse, trailing a lunch pail on a strap. The rest of the children followed in short order.

The school shack was the community building. Later, some of the men would eat dinner from tin plates at the plank tables the children used for desks. There might be a meeting tonight, where the men would talk about military tactics they’d gleaned from World War II movies. They didn’t have many veterans here. Or women. There were about 400 people: a few dozen families with children, a scattering of women, and about three hundred men. As far as she knew, she was the only person who wasn’t a mutant, besides the prepubescent children.

Her mother met her before she’d reached home. The parched air had stolen the luster from Wanda’s scarlet hair, leaving it brittle and dull. It wasn’t the air that had stolen the hope from her eyes though, that was all father’s doing. When Edith had timidly asked her mother if she liked living in Genosha, Wanda had only sighed and warned Edith not to marry an angry man.

“How long ago did the children leave?” she asked Edith, without even saying hello or asking how her day had gone. 

“Just a few minutes,” Edith replied.

“Go to their homes. Warn them to stay indoors. I’ll find their parents. We have to keep the children safe.” Wanda’s eyes were always strained, but not like this.

“Mother? What happened?” 

“It hasn’t happened yet.” Wanda’s mutation crinkled her connection with time; she could alter perceptions, sense things that were happening, and channel chaos into probability-warping hexes. “Max went to Chollas for supplies. It hasn’t happened yet, but when it does, they’ll come for us. Warn the children, Edith!”

“Yes, Mother,” Edith replied. Father was going to bring the end times down upon them, because the first hell he had lived through in Germany was not enough for him. There were days when Edith could not tell the difference between loving her father and hating him.

_ Creator of us all, why did you give my father so much power and so much pain? Couldn’t you have just given him one or the other? _ Edith believed in G-d. She didn’t understand him, and she held several grudges against him, but she did believe. 

Wanda was already running towards the fields where most of the adults were irrigating the crops, Genosha’s red dust coating her ankle boots and the hem of her canvas skirt like dried splatters of blood.

* * *

Edith tracked down the children and warned them to stay indoors until their parents came for them. Indoors wasn’t any safer than outdoors, as most of them were still living in tents made of duck canvas strapped over frames of crooked Joshua tree limbs. She saved the Bishops for last, because they lived in one of the other sheet metal shacks, and Edith liked those better than the tents. She knew Betty Bishop would ask her to shelter with them.

“Do I have to call you teacher when I’m not in school?” Elijah demanded.

Edith shook her head, unable to smile at him. She wasn’t a teacher right now. Fear ate through her fragile 15-year-old maturity and she wanted a grownup to tell her everything would be alright, not try to put an eight-year-old at ease.

“Will you mind the baby while I’m at the well?” Betty asked Edith, not waiting for an answer before setting an infant on her lap. Betty’s baby was the only baby in Genosha. Edith didn’t wonder why they had left everything to come to Genosha. The four tentacles sprouting from Betty’s shoulders were too thick to hide under clothing, and here she didn’t have to hide them. She even wore the nickname ‘Spider’ with pride instead of shame now.

The baby blinked dark eyes at her before opening her mouth for a petulant wail.

“She knows you ain’t mama,” Elijah told her, coming to sit on the log bench next to her.

Two of Betty’s tentacles shook out the woven hemp carry harness and then she filled it with glass water jars with her hands and arranged it over her shoulders, the other two tentacles settling the harness into place. Genosha’s water came from a well. They had neither the time nor the know-how to pump it into the few buildings in Genosha. Betty was smart to replenish their water supply before whatever they were dreading actually happened. Edith should have suggested it to the others.

“Get your harness, Elijah. Baby Harriet will be fine until we get back,” Betty said.

Elijah left off patting Baby Harriet’s fuzzy head and fetched his own water harness, following his mother out the door opening; the door itself was set off to the side during daylight hours so the heat in the sheet metal shacks didn’t reach lethal levels. Edith missed real doors, ones with hinges and door knobs. Edith used to take things like that for granted, back in Brooklyn, when they lived in a cramped two-room apartment, made luxurious by running water and glass windows. If only she could go home, she wouldn’t even mind sharing that beautiful apartment with the cockroaches. Why had she ever complained about cockroaches? At least they couldn’t sting like scorpions. And no one had to warn you about poisonous snakes, either. Or heat stroke. Father’s assurance that Genosha would be safer for both mutants and Jews than Brooklyn crumbled a bit more every time he had to warn her about yet another way the landscape could kill her.

* * *

Edith knew her mother would find her, and she did. Wanda Eisenhardt came in with Lucas Bishop. Wanda had an apron full of rubbery carrots, and Lucas had a dead gopher. Betty Bishop poured some of the well water into a pot and added a handful of salt. Elijah took the gopher and a skinning knife to the hard-packed dirt yard behind the shack. Edith bounced Baby Harriet on her knees while Wanda and Betty washed the carrots. Lucas followed Elijah into the backyard to stoke the cooking fire for the gopher stew.

She wanted to ask her mother why she didn’t go with her father to Chollas, especially if she knew something bad was going to happen. Wanda could change probability, and most of the time, she changed it the way she wanted. Not always, but usually.

With both women working on the carrots, they went into the stew pot quickly. When Betty carried the pot to the cooking fire in the backyard, Edith asked, “Has it started yet?”

Wanda nodded, wiping her damp hands on her apron. She didn’t look at her daughter. “It started the moment Max left this morning. His course was set and the probabilities were not strong enough to change his mind.”

Wanda called him ‘Max’ when she was hopeless. She called him ‘your father’ when she thought things might go well.

“Could I see?” Edith asked, reaching for her mother’s forehead.

“Not this, Edith, you don’t need to see this.”

Edith dropped her hand back down to trace fingers across the baby’s dusky cheeks again. The baby held still when her face was being tickled. 

“He will bring down upon us the destruction he wanted to avoid,” Wanda said.

Edith believed her.

“He asked me to go with him today and I said no.” Wanda looked at Edith as if seeking her approval. No one else in Genosha would understand why Wanda would have said no, because no one else knew Max the way the two of them did. To the others, he was a powerful and charismatic leader, not a broken man who would destroy himself and everyone around him rather than admit defeat.

_ Why, Adonai? Why did you give him so much power? If you took away his power, he would stop trying so hard to fight. Creator of us all, take away my father’s power before he destroys us. _

When Edith didn’t nod in approval or say she understood, Wanda looked away, rubbing at a spot of dirt on her apron. “I thought I could save him, you know. I thought my own power could change his reality enough to save him.”

Edith kept tracing fingers over the baby’s face. She had never asked her mother why she married her father, any more than she asked why Gentiles hated Jews and humans hated mutants. Some things just were. 

“I’ve been able to change things before, you know. When I met your father, all I could see was his pain and my chance to heal him.”

Edith stayed silent. She didn’t see her father’s pain; only his anger. His pain he barricaded behind that silence about his first family. The reason Edith wanted to ask about her brothers who had died was because she wanted to hear what it sounded like for her father to talk about a child he loved.

“Probabilities and realities; these are events. I can only change events, Edith, events that haven’t happened yet. I can’t change the past. I can’t change a mind or a heart. I didn’t realize the limits of my power until I had already married him. I can’t change that either.”

“Would you change it if you could?” Edith asked in a low voice. Changing that choice would unmake her, yet she didn’t know if that was a bad result or a good one.

“No. I would have changed the limits on my power. That’s what I would have changed. But it doesn’t matter anymore.”

Edith remembered an odd discussion she’d had with her mother just a few weeks before. Wanda had started talking about Moses and the Ten Plagues of Egypt. Moses was the greatest miracle worker in the Torah, and all Jews knew the story of Moses channeling the power of G-d into the Ten Plagues - the Nile turned to blood, frogs, lice, flies, cattle pestilence, boils, a hail of fire, locusts, darkness, and the destroying angel to slay the firstborn. The Plagues ended when Pharaoh let the Hebrew slaves go free. The discussion hadn’t really been a conversation. Edith had simply listened, shelling a few peas that had survived the Arizona summer heat, while her mother erupted with the insight that the Ten Plagues were about the limits on Moses’ power. “He couldn’t change Pharaoh’s mind, Edith! All of that power, and he couldn’t change Pharaoh’s mind! Pharaoh let us go out of despair when the last Plague killed his son, but even then, he followed us into the wilderness for a massacre. And instead, Moses drowned his army in the Red Sea and left Pharaoh broken, defeated and childless, but not changed. Moses could not change what he most wanted to change! The story is about Moses’ powerlessness, not his power! Why did I never see this before, Edith?”

Then she had wept, brokenhearted and inconsolable. Edith had set the peas aside to try and comfort her mother. Wanda cried herself out, and neither one of them spoke of it again. 

Now Edith realized Wanda saw herself, and her own powerlessness, in Moses. All the incredible power she had at her disposal, and she could not change the one thing she wanted most to change. 

Edith was used to feeling powerless. She rather imagined it was a shock to someone like her mother, though.

“Can you see the probabilities?” Edith asked. Baby Harriet had drifted off to sleep in her lap. Outside, she could hear Betty and Lucas talking about gopher stew. 

“I don’t want to see them anymore, so they don’t come.”

Edith didn’t believe that. If you could get rid of a mutation by not wanting it, then there wouldn’t be any mutants left.

* * *

Late that night, after Edith had gone to bed, she heard things. Terrible things like metal creaking and crashing, and even explosions. She kept her eyes shut tight, but physical sight wasn’t necessary when her mother warped reality. The hallucinations slipped in behind her eyelids and told her she couldn’t trust her own senses or mind. She knew it wasn’t true, but only because her mother had taught her what to do when reality warped with Wanda’s power. The air hummed with the threat.

The next morning, Genosha looked much the same. It wasn’t until Edith walked to the nasty pit toilets on the outskirts of Genosha that she saw distant piles of things that might have once been cars or jeeps. Or perhaps rocket launchers. Bits of oily smoke hovered over them, gawking at the destruction. Fresh craters in the reddish dirt looked like splashes from this distance. A big truck with a red cross on it was parked out there. People picked up some of the smaller piles, the things that weren’t metal. 

Edith hurried into the latrine before she had to think about what they were picking up.

* * *

Edith found out what her father had done to the village of Chollas from a newspaper that someone left behind in the community building. She found it the next week, after all of Genosha knew her father’s version - that he had destroyed the town to warn the United States military to stop threatening to attack Genosha. The newspaper said that Max Eisenhardt had declared his independence from the United States, and destroyed Chollas in a fit of anger when the mayor refused to recognize Eisenhardt’s sovereignty. 

Edith wasn’t sure which version to believe. Reality could be more than one thing, Edith had learned over the years of being Wanda’s daughter. She could believe both that her father had defended Genosha by destroying Chollas, and that Chollas had done nothing to provoke such destruction. The fact that he had killed people was true in either reality. It was odd to think of herself as the daughter of a murderer, so she clipped that part out of her mind and let it go.

Max gloried in his victory over the United States’ attack after he destroyed Chollas and killed the soldiers in the Arizona National Guard. He told everyone that he had defeated the mighty United States military with his power. They believed him and celebrated. At first. Then checkpoints were set up at the roads into and out of Genosha, and food couldn’t be brought in anymore.

If you ignored the newspapers and what everyone was saying, life continued much as it had before Max Eisenhardt destroyed to Chollas. Except some of the things you expected to have were harder to get. There would be no paper at all for school, and the only vegetables would be the ones they could grow or forage for themselves, once the canned goods were gone. The community gave up on lettuce and beans, and learned to eat wild onion and sego lily bulbs. This was to be a sign of their strength and dedication to their cause. Indeed, it seemed that the rest of the community was proud of the nasty food. They called it the taste of freedom.

Edith thought it was the taste of despair. 

“You will eat it!” Max shouted at her one evening, when she pushed away her plate of untouched stew. It was mostly sego lily mash, with a bit of meat that might have been a rat.

“No.” Edith never shouted. “I hate it as much as I hate the dust and the heat. I hate Genosha. I want to go home.”

“This is home! This is our home and we will defend it!” Max shouted back at her quiet words. The skin stretched tightly over his sharp cheekbones. They had all lost weight since he had destroyed Chollas and no more food could be brought in.

“Max,” Wanda said, her voice soft and warning at the same time.

“She doesn’t believe in what we’re doing here, Wanda! My own daughter!”

Father could destroy her entire life and all her happiness, and still believe he had a right to her support. Edith dissolved into tears that she didn’t bother to wipe away. They leaked out from under the hands covering her eyes and dripped off her chin.

“You saw how this ends, Max. I showed you. I showed you the vision before you ever went to Chollas that day,” Wanda said, her voice still soft. It wasn’t kindness that took the edge off of her words; it was hopelessness.

“The vision was a warning, not a prophecy. I’ve changed it. I’ve changed the future, Wanda! If you would look for the vision again, you would see how different the future is! They will respect us now that they have seen my power. No one will attack us now that they know the fate that awaits them!” 

This was not a new declaration. Max had been insisting on variations of it ever since he destroyed Chollas. Not even Wanda thought she could change reality anymore, but Max still believed he could.

_ Creator of us all, take away my father’s power. If you can’t heal his pain, take away his power. _

Edith cried harder and Max slammed his chair back in response to his daughter’s tears and his wife’s silence. He stalked out of the room. Edith felt her mother’s hand come down on her hair, brushed back into a bun to protect it from sun and dust, wound tight and hidden away, the way Edith protected her soul and hopes for future happiness, if only she could survive her father.

“He will see, Edith. He will see what he’s doing in time to stop, and we’ll all be fine,” Wanda said, soothing her.

“Don’t lie to me, mother. You said yourself that you can’t see the probabilities anymore. Don’t tell me lies.”

It was the first time in her life that Edith had ever talked back to her mother.

“Edith, it isn’t lies.” Wanda’s voice wobbled, and Edith wondered why both of her parents thought she was strong enough to support either one of them in their delusions. “It’s hope.”

Edith wiped away tears and snot on the rough canvas of her shirt sleeve and left the table.

* * *

** _Ten months later _ **

“Hey kid.”

Edith startled, and some of the precious water she was pumping into a glass bottle splashed over her hand and onto the ground. She recovered quickly and kept pumping. Once the final bottle of water was full, she screwed on the lid and gathered up the net bag full of water bottles and slung it over her shoulder. “Hi, Wolverine.”

Wolverine had appeared last week. He’d strolled into town, wearing a long-sleeve plaid shirt and cowboy hat against the sun, chewing on a cigar and wondering why his arrival kicked up so much fuss. Genosha hadn’t seen a new arrival in the ten months since Max destroyed Chollas; the entire winter had gone by with only the four hundred or so people in Genosha.

Max had wanted to arrest him as a spy until Wolverine popped eight-inch long bone claws out of his fists. Wolverine quickly disabused him of his next notion, which was that Wolverine was the first of a wave of mutant support troops who would break this siege and win mutants their independence from the United States. Instead, he just poked around Genosha a bit, chewed on a cigar that he never lit, grunted a lot, and refused to tell anyone his proper name. 

“Carry that for you?”

Edith swung the net bag back off her shoulder and handed it to Wolverine. She felt more comfortable around Wolverine than around the rest of the mutants here. For one thing, he didn’t seem to believe in Genosha’s mission. The longer this siege went on, the more strongly the people here believed that they would ultimately prove victorious. Her father was a lot of the reason for that. The more hopeless their situation became, the more fired up his rhetoric became. Max Eisenhardt’s words were as magnetic as his power. 

Wolverine seemed immune to him, however. 

“You do know I’m not a mutant, right?” Edith blurted out.

“Yep.”

Edith relaxed some more, and offered Wolverine a small smile. He gave her half a smile in return, teeth clamped around that nasty cigar.

“Why don’t you ever light that thing?”

“I’ve only got one.”

Edith nodded. That made sense. “I have a package of crackers.”

“Oh?”

“You know how restaurants give you saltines in cellophane when you order soup? I got some at the cafe in Chollas. I still have them.”

“Recently?”

“Last year. Before.” There was no need to specify before what. “Do you think I should give them to Betty? For the baby?” Baby Harriet was a toddler now, with eight teeth and a fuzz of black hair with a ribbon that was more often in Baby Harriet’s fist than in her hair. Edith suspected the ribbon used to be the hem of one of Betty’s skirts. Everyone was hungry now. They’d harvested the winter wheat, and that helped some, but ash cakes without molasses really weren’t that filling. The baby needed vitamins. They’d eaten the last of the canned vegetables months ago. “I haven’t given them to her because saltines aren’t much better than eating cardboard with salt on it.”

That made Wolverine smile again, which thrilled Edith all the way down to her toes. She was 16 years old, and no man had ever smiled at something she’d said. Her father never smiled at all, and neither did the men who spent hours and hours with her father, making plans and talking about what they would do if only they had supplies. The seven teenage boys in Genosha imitated the men and talked about war, and mutant superiority. If they looked at her at all, it was with pity or scorn that Max Eisenhardt had a human daughter, never with a smile. Smiles were as scarce as fruit in Genosha. It was fortunate they had the well. It was a pain to carry water all the time, but they had as much water as they needed. Water was as plentiful as plans.

They were walking past a row of the canvas tents so many of them were still using for shelter when someone cried out. “Who’s there? Help us!”

Wolverine figured out which tent the voice was coming from before Edith did, and set the net bag of water bottles on the ground in front of the tent flap. The canvas was loosely tied shut on the inside, so Wolverine shook it. “Whatcha need?”

Mortimer Toynbee, a snivelly hunchback nicknamed Toad, stuck his head out of the tent. “Frank’s took sick. Bad. Do you know where the Doc is?”

The Doc was Cecilia Reyes, a Hispanic woman who could project force fields and had been a nurse on the front lines during World War II. 

“I’ll go find her,” Edith said, so she had a reason not to go into the tent. 

“Hell, I don’t know nothing about sick people,” she heard Wolverine say as she darted away.

Cecelia wasn’t far away, and she sighed when Edith told her that Frank was sick. “Must be a parasite in the water. Is it bloody diarrhea?”

“I don’t know,” Edith said. Ick. Didn’t everyone know to boil the water first?

Cecelia took a dog-eared notebook out of her pocket and wrote something in it with the stub of a pencil. Edith hadn’t seen paper and pencil in months. “In a population this size, seventeen cases of bloody diarrhea make an epidemic. Boil your water.” This last instruction was given to Arcade, the man who followed Cecelia out of the tent. From behind him, Edith could hear other men groaning in pain. Fortunately, the tent flap was shut, so she didn’t have to see them.

“We did boil the water,” Arcade protested.

“Boil it longer,” Cecelia snapped back. “Let’s go Edith. Tell your father the first case was reported two days ago. If we’ve got an epidemic on our hands, we’ll need some leadership besides talks about victory. Who’s next?”

Edith led Cecelia to Toad’s tent. A saucepan of water set over the sterno can steamed weakly on the hard-packed dirt floor.

Cecelia pointed to the saucepan. “That’s your problem right there. You can’t boil the water long enough to kill parasites with what passes for sterno fuel anymore.”

Frank groaned, and Edith wrinkled her nose to see the mess he’d made right there on the pallet of straw and blankets that served as a bed. She backed out of the tent. The net bag of water bottles still sat where Wolverine had set them down. The sun sparkled on the water through the glass, so cheerfully deceptive. 

“Let’s go,” Wolverine said, leaving Cecelia to the sickness in the tent and picking up the net bag. “You boil this good and long, you hear me?”

Edith felt that thrill again. Wolverine smiled at her earlier, and now he was concerned that she didn’t take sick. “I don’t need to drink it for days. I’ve still got my water bottles from last week. I put leaves in it, to flavor it. I don’t know what the plant is called, but it has those frondy leaves and sometimes a yellow flower. The well water tastes metallic, don’t you think? But with the leaves, it tastes more like the sage tea we used to have in Brooklyn. Except I don’t heat it up; Genosha is too hot already, even in April.” It was a thrill to talk about an idea she’d had, even one as unimportant as how to flavor the well water. Wolverine looked at her when she talked, and cocked an eyebrow like she’d said something interesting.

She stopped talking. Then she blushed. Then she looked at the ground, watching her feet in their cracked and dust-coated sneakers striding along. Suddenly, she wished she had patent leather pumps, shiny and pointed at the toe, with silk stockings and a skirt that was a color other than red dirt. 

“Sounds like a good idea,” Wolverine said.

Edith fell in love.

* * *

Because Edith believed in G-d, she also believed in the devil. Bronwyn Goldstein was possessed by an evil spirit from the devil, and that’s why she was scratching the skin off her arms and keening like that. It wasn’t just Bronwyn, either. Hezekiah Cornelius, a middle-aged man whose arms could stretch up to fifteen feet, was catatonic. Betty Bishop was baying at the moon, her tentacles shriveled and hanging motionless down her back. Those were the ones who were outside of the tents. From inside the tents, she could hear groaning. The stench of diarrhea was strong enough to smell in the streets. None of those suffering were strong enough to get to the pit toilets on the outskirts of Genosha, and some had already died. Edith backed away from Savage, and nearly tripped over Walt Jays, a jumper with green hair who was curled into a fetal position in the dirt, gnawing on his knuckles. 

Mother had sent her for help, but there was no one who could help. 

The full moon was the only light tonight. Her eyes had adapted well enough to the silvery dimness that she turned to hurry back home and away from this parade of horrors. This wasn’t a parasite in the water, which was what they’d all thought four days ago when the illnesses started. This was the work of the devil.

Edith’s steps slowed as she reached their shack. The moonlight glinted off the sheet metal siding and corrugated tin roof. The door was a couple of planks nailed to a crosspiece that she had to lift and set aside to get in and out. She’d left the door open in her hurry to leave, and the shadows made the empty doorway look like a mouth that would swallow her whole. They were all going to die. Father thought he was strong enough to fight for all of them, but not even father could fight the devil. She stopped and put her hands over her mouth to stifle the sobs.

“Hey, kid.”

Edith whirled, and didn’t let herself think about it because she knew she wouldn’t do it if she thought about it. She leaned against Wolverine and shook with sobs until he put an arm around her. There. That was enough. Wolverine cared enough to comfort her. She could die happy now.

“Your folks took sick yet?”

Edith nodded against his cloth shirt. Wolverine was the only one in Genosha not dressing in canvas and homespun. He had a real shirt, with fabric that had come from a store. It was soft, and she pressed her cheek against it and tried to remember when her clothes had felt like that.

“Fits or the runs?”

It seemed so disrespectful to talk about your parents having diarrhea so bad that they couldn’t get to the toilet. “The runs,” she whispered.

“You boiled the water?”

“Of course we did!”

“So did everyone else.” 

They’d thought the water just needed to be boiled longer, so they’d boiled the water and drunk it, because there was nothing else. Because of the siege, there wasn’t a single bottle of Coca-Cola, fruit juice or any other drink that wasn’t well water. You drank the water, or you died of dehydration in the desert. They drank the water.

Wolverine just stood there and let her lean on him, and rub her cheek against the fabric on his chest. She was so glad Wolverine wasn’t a telepath. She would be ashamed for him to know that she wasn’t worrying about her parents right now.

“You’re not sick?”

Edith shook her head, her forehead brushing across the cloth of his shirt. “You?”

“I don’t get sick, kid.”

They were the only healthy people in all of Genosha. She liked having something in common with Wolverine.

“Did you drink the water?”

Edith shook her head again, because of the cloth against her forehead. Wolverine still had an arm lightly around her waist. “I still have my bottles with the leaves in them from last week. Have you drunk the water?”

“No. I got beer.”

That brought her head up. If anyone in Genosha knew that Wolverine had beer, he’d get mobbed for it. 

“There’s poison in the water.”

“Either that, or it’s the devil,” Edith said seriously, then wondered if Wolverine believed in the devil. Was he even Jewish?

“I don’t believe in a devil, kid. God neither.”

“I do.” 

Wolverine didn’t have his cigar, so when he smiled, it was a full smile.

Edith scowled back at the smile. He didn’t need to be patronizing about it. Lots of people believed in G-d and the devil.

“I’m not making fun of you, kid, I just haven’t met anyone in a while who believes in, well, in anything, really. If it makes you happy, go ahead and believe whatever you want.”

“It doesn’t make me happy,” Edith said, stung at the naiveté he was implying. Did he think she believed in fairy tales too? Believing in G-d and the devil wasn’t about happiness. “It’s because it means there’s something in this universe more powerful than my father.”

“Yeah, okay, I get that.” 

He wasn’t smiling at her anymore.

“C’mon, let’s talk to your parents.”

Max was in the main room, which wasn’t where he’d been when she left. Her mother was out of sight. As much as Edith resented her father, she hated seeing him curled up and in pain, unable to control his own bowels.

“There’s no one to help, father. I looked for Cecelia, but she’s sicker than you are. Anyone who isn’t . . . isn’t emptying their bowels is having some kind of fit.” Edith made her report and wished her father were strong enough to yell and be powerful. She would rather fear him than pity him.

Max pushed himself to a sitting position and looked at Wolverine instead of at her. “You said you wouldn’t follow my orders, so this isn’t an order. I’m begging you. Get my daughter out of here.”

“Yeah.” Wolverine gave a short nod.

As much as she’d wanted to leave Genosha, she didn’t want to leave like this. At the same time, she certainly wasn’t going to ask to stay. “I have to say good-bye. I have to get . . .” Edith turned towards the canvas curtain that served as a door to their second room.

“Don’t you go in there!” Max roared, and for just an instant, Edith almost obeyed him.

She stopped, and then realized she was leaving more than just Genosha. She knew she would never see her father again, and the thought filled her with relief. He was weak enough now that she dared to rebel. 

“I will say good-bye to my mother. You can’t stop me,” Edith said. 

“Edith, please don’t go in there. It’s too late.” Max’s words were broken now, and he was slumping over, exhausted from the effort to sit up.

Edith wavered. Her father had never before said ‘please’ to her. But it was too little, too late. She pushed the canvas curtain out of the way.

In the moonlight, the spill of Wanda’s hair over the floor was gray, and her face was white. The pool of blood on the floor was black as oil in the night, only the thick coppery smell was tinged with red. Edith was not surprised; all the worst things were inevitable now. She touched her mother’s forehead. It did not bring her any sense of her mother, or the probabilities, or the chaotic tumble of magic and power that characterized her mother’s mind. Edith knelt and kissed her forehead. “Good-bye. I forgive you for sending me away instead of saying good-bye.” 

She spread a blanket over her mother’s face and body, leaving her hand loosely grasping the knife that she’d used to open a vein. Stepping carefully around her body, Edith retrieved her precious bottles of uncontaminated water. When the canvas curtain swung shut behind her, she felt taller somehow. The chains that tethered her to Genosha and the mutants were breaking. Once she was free, she would never look back. 

“Did you know she was going to kill herself when she asked me to go find help?”

Max struggled to sit up again. Wolverine sat on a crate across the room, elbows on his knees and his head hung down.

“She wanted to see the probabilities. She wanted to see if she could change them.”

“Why didn’t you stop her? You must have sensed the knife! You could have stopped her long enough for me to say good-bye!” 

Perhaps mother saw enough of the probabilities to know she would die anyway, and wanted to cut her suffering short. Edith still wished she had waited long enough to say good-bye.

Max stretched out a hand, fingers straining towards the sheet metal walls. Edith tensed for the collapse, but nothing happened. “I can’t. I heard her screaming that she couldn’t see the probabilities, and I realized I couldn’t feel the magnetism any longer. We’re human now, Edith.” His eyes filled with tears and hopelessness.

_ Creator of us all, when I asked you to take away my father’s power, I didn’t mean this! _

“Get her out of here, Wolverine. Shalom, Edith, I will not forget you in this life or the next.”

Edith stared at him, wondering if he meant those words to sound as sinister as they did. _ I will forget you as soon as I can, you and everything you stand for. I will search for a life of peace, and that means you will not be part of it, not even your memory. Adonai, forgive me for not honoring my father. _

“Here.” Edith set the bottles of clean water down next to him. There was nothing she wanted to take from this desolate little shack that had never felt like home. She left without saying good-bye, and Wolverine followed her out.

They walked all night. Wolverine gave her a bottle of beer to drink, the only alcohol she’d ever had besides the wine at Seder. The bitterness suited her soul and hazed her thoughts. When the sun rose, Wolverine stopped them to try and sleep. But first, they turned and looked back at Genosha from a small rise speckled with cactus and lizards. The ramshackle settlement looked even more pathetic from this vantage point, only a few sheet metal huts and rows of canvas tents. Edith’s emotions, loosened by fatigue and beer, got the better of her and she wept at this proof that her father’s reality could never be as powerful as his dreams.

Wolverine let her cry. Edith didn’t lean on him again. It was too strange, now that they were alone. She pointed out beyond the settlement, where there was a row of something large in a line too orderly to be natural. “What’s that?”

“Tanks and jeeps. Military.”

“Are they going to attack Genosha?” 

“Doubt it. They don’t have to, not anymore.”

Oh. Father’s attack on Chollas had brought retaliation after all. “The military poisoned the water? They’re just going to wait for everyone to die?”

"Maybe they'll give clean water to anyone who surrenders." He didn't sound very convinced of that, but Edith appreciated the attempt to assuage her guilt at running away. 

“Genosha was a ghetto, just like father feared,” Edith said. “We gathered ourselves up to be slaughtered at their convenience.” She laughed, briefly and hysterically. “Father did it! He swore he wasn’t making a ghetto and a death camp, but he did it!”

Wolverine didn’t answer. He just sat down on a rock and waited for Edith to pull herself together. It didn’t take her very long. 

“Let’s go, kid,” Wolverine said, standing up. “There’s some shade over there. Get some rest. You’ll feel better after some sleep.”

* * *

Wolverine took her all the way to New York City, and she still never knew his real name. He was good at deflecting questions. The first love of her life was as much of a mystery to her as her father was. She cried when he left, but she’d been crying multiple times a day for so long that it didn’t seem unusual.

Great-Aunt Mabel Maximoff was one of those accepting and sensible types who didn’t tell you not to feel bad when you obviously felt bad. She just tucked Edith into the pullout bed on the couch and gave her an extra blanket.

“Cry yourself out, Edie, and we’ll talk about tomorrow when it gets here.”

No one had called her Edie since she was a very young child. She liked it, like she could erase the past ten years and go back to being Edie again. She pictured herself putting memories into a metal file cabinet and locking it with a key. Half of Genosha was gone before she fell asleep.

Over the next several weeks, Edith went about becoming Edie. Great-Aunt Mabel (“just call me Mabel, ducky, you make me feel old with that ‘great-aunt’ business”) fussed over her and identified her as Wanda’s daughter to anyone who didn’t already know who she was. Wanda’s family had always thought Max would be bad news, and they were content to let him fade away into silence. Edie kept to Mabel’s small apartment as much as she could, working on embroidery and helping with the cooking. With her long-established habit of ignoring the news, Genosha faded into bad dreams. Sometimes, Edie felt like she’d imagined it all. Those were the best days.

About two months after she’d arrived in the cocoon of Mabel’s Brooklyn apartment, Mabel sat down with a cup of tea and a newspaper that she handed to Edie. Edie read the headline story, about Max Eisenhardt’s capture and imprisonment, and the intention to have his metallokinetic mutation blocked with a combination of drugs and hypnosis. The newspaper was three weeks old. Edie was grateful to Mabel for waiting until there wasn’t anything she could do about it before telling her about her father’s fate.

“Do you want to try and go see him?” Mabel asked.

Edie didn’t have to think about it very long before she shook her head.

Mabel nodded.

“Do you think I’m a bad person?” Edie asked.

Mabel heaved out a huge sigh. She was a stout woman in her sixties who still worked as a seamstress in a factory and had never married. Edie remembered her crying when Wanda said she was moving to Genosha with Max and taking her with them. Ever since then, Edie had thought of Mabel as someone who cared about her, and she worried that Mabel thought she was a bad person for not wanting to see her father. 

“I’ve lived long enough to know that hanging onto the past can do a lot of harm, Edie. If you want to leave your father in the past, I won’t try to argue you out of it,” Mabel said at last.

Edie nodded, and it felt like a huge weight rolled off her shoulders and gave her room to see if she could find some happiness in life after all.

* * *

Edie didn’t want to go back to school, and Mabel didn’t push. Instead, she stayed in Mabel’s apartment for the next four years, occasionally venturing out to the market or synagogue. Gradually, the fear that her life would be forced into a path she didn’t want faded. Mabel was human too, and Edie didn’t feel like her own humanity was a disappointment anymore. She ate all the fruits and vegetables she wanted, and never complained about rain or cockroaches. 

Once in a while, she saw a newspaper headline about Max Eisenhardt’s court case that was rocketing towards the Supreme Court. The debate about mutants and their rights to use their powers consumed the news. Edie hated the news. The one time she read the entire newspaper article, it said that Eisenhardt’s health was bad. No matter how much he ate, he was eventually going to starve to death. The newspaper article made it sound like it was cancer. Edie didn’t believe that. She’d read an article in _ Time _ magazine about mutation suppressant drugs, which caused harm if a mutant got the wrong drug. The _ Time _ article didn’t describe the harm very specifically, but uncontrollable diarrhea full of blood could fit within the vague ‘intestinal damage’ the article mentioned, and the fits she’d witnessed might be the ‘mental distress’ side effect. She wondered if Wolverine saw that article, and if he believed the military put mutation suppressant drugs in Genosha’s well.

In fact, there was now a whole new way to classify mutants, based on which drugs suppressed their mutations and which drugs could kill them. A company called Xavier Pharmaceuticals was being hailed as humanity’s savior from the mutant scourge. There was talk that they would soon be able to cure mutantism, along with cancer and diabetes. Edie didn’t believe it because it was too good to be true.

Edie spent a week being haunted by the memories of the dying people in Genosha the night she’d left with Wolverine. She stopped reading the news again.

When she was in her early twenties, Edie started to have some embarrassing health problems. They were indelicate, so she waited as long as she could before telling Mabel she needed to see a doctor. Mabel scolded her for waiting so long, and made the appointment. After a whole series of embarrassing tests, the doctor told Edie that she would never be able to have children. Edie stared at him with wide eyes and a trembling chin before her heart overflowed into quiet tears.

The doctor tried to speak kindly. Edie let him say the things he thought would be comforting. She didn’t tell him these were tears of joy. Edie knew mutations could be inherited; she knew about DNA and genetics and the way traits passed down through generations. She’d already decided to be like Mabel, and never marry or have children. Now, she was free to marry if anyone ever wanted her. Max and Wanda Eisenhardt’s genes ended with her. Her past could never show up in her future. 

Edie walked around in a glow of happiness, wanting to stop people in the street and tell them that they should thank her for being barren. She felt like a soldier who had jumped on a grenade. Her genes would die with her, and she imagined the silent gratitude of all the people who would never know what they owed her. 

Her newfound peace gave her courage to rejoin the world of young people again. Mabel, who had never criticized her for hiding out at home, kissed her and bought her shiny black shoes and pretty skirts.

Six months after Max Eisenhardt died of starvation due to his damaged intestines, Edie Maximoff married Jakob Lehnsherr under a canopy. She was 24 years old, and had no secrets from her new husband. She told him everything: her parents, Genosha, being barren. 

He loved her anyway.

Three years after their wedding, Jakob Lehnsherr got a job offer in Pearler, Virginia. Edie jumped at the chance to leave Brooklyn. Mabel had died of pneumonia the year before. She wasn’t close to anyone else, but a few people still knew that Wanda Maximoff had married Max Eisenhardt and had a daughter named Edith. In Pearler, she would never be anyone besides Edie Lehnsherr.

Jakob bought her a house with a yard in the suburbs, and Edie learned to grow vegetables in good, black dirt that produced peas and beans by the bushel. She planted flowers and baked cookies for the neighbor children. She had friends and hobbies and a husband who loved her. 

She snapped her life neatly in half and forgot to be afraid of her past anymore.

When Edie was forty-one years old, she went to the doctor with a list of mysterious symptoms. The doctor ran a test, and grinned from ear to ear when he gave her the results. Edie didn’t smile back. She dissolved into her customary quiet tears and went home.

“But Edie, this is beautiful news! This is a blessing on our house!” Jakob insisted. He had a stack of clean handkerchiefs that he handed to her one by one.

Edie had no doubt that Jakob would accept any baby as a blessing. His conviction that life would be good to them was one of the traits that had drawn her to him. Over the next few weeks of Jakob’s prayers of gratitude and plans for a nursery, Edie decided to believe in his optimism. In fact, she started to think of what it would be like to have a quiet, dark-haired baby girl. A little child whom she could love, and make safe. She would never make her baby feel like a disappointment, or drag her into a life she didn’t want. 

Jakob painted the nursery and found them a crib and a stroller. Edie started to love the baby growing under her heart. They only had a few months to prepare. Edie had been five months along before she’d gone to the doctor. It wasn’t much time to up-end her entire life and hope for something other than what she feared, but Edie did her best.

_ Creator of us all, I have always believed in you, even when I hated you. Now you have sent me a child. I know the stories of Sarah, Rebekah and Rachel -- all barren women until you sent sons, strong and powerful sons. I don’t need a strong and powerful son. A daughter would do just as well. But either way, Creator of us all, please let my baby be human. _

_ Please. _


	11. Halloween

Charles woke up on Monday morning wondering how he could possibly go to work like his life was still ordinary. Erik was _ Eisenhardt’s fucking grandson _ and Max Eisenhardt had sent sixteen-year-old Edie out of Genosha with Logan when the military poisoned the well. Charles had been audience to the entire seven hour conversation between Erik and Logan because he couldn’t go home until Erik drove him home, and Erik drove to Logan’s trailer instead because he thought Marie should hear all of this. Marie and Charles mostly exchanged wide-eyed looks with each other while Logan and Erik talked and talked about mutants and the military.

Erik did most of the talking, and eventually even Logan started to look exhausted at Erik’s ability to talk and talk and talk. Erik was most interested in Max and Wanda Eisenhardt’s philosophies, and he poured out hours of details about Max’s destruction of Chollas. Charles wondered if Erik wanted to try destroying a city himself someday, or if the enthusiasm in his voice was because he finally got to talk about his grandfather. Erik’s obvious admiration for his grandfather started to unnerve Charles. He’d been raised to think of Max Eisenhardt as a terrorist. Erik almost sounded like he was praising him. Almost. 

“How did they defeat him, Logan? Why did you leave before my grandfather was captured?” Erik demanded.

Marie and Charles were peeling potatoes for sausage and potato fry, which Logan and Marie ate about four days a week. Charles hadn’t gotten a word in edgewise to tell Marie that Logan could now afford more food. Logan was munching on raw pasta and had taken a five minute break from Erik’s monologue to dig sausage out of the back of the fridge.

“Poison. I told you. The whole town took sick the night we left,” Logan answered shortly.

“Mom never said anything about poison,” Erik replied.

“Has your mom ever said anything about Genosha?” Logan asked.

Erik, blessedly, paused for a moment to think. Charles peeked. Erik’s mind roiled with inchoate intentions and ideas to expose the military war crime and demand reparations and get the Supreme Court case overturned, leading to full equality for mutants. He didn’t stop there. Charles, who had never peeled potatoes before, cut his finger on the potato peeler when Erik’s plans for mutant world domination caught all of his attention. Charles had long since learned that the difference between what people thought and what people said was vast and important. Erik might just be thinking idle thoughts, a reaction to the shock of finally finding out the answers to some of his questions. If he didn’t voice them, they wouldn’t become real.

Charles decided to point out a few obstacles to break Erik’s chain of thought.

“You won’t have any proof of what happened, you know,” Charles said. “You can’t expose to the whole world what really happened in Genosha without any proof. Logan can’t testify. No offense, Logan, but your memory is literally shot to hell and you’d be discredited in an instant. You’d have to put the only other person who remembers Genosha in the public spotlight and let Internet trolls tear her to pieces.”

The intensity of Erik’s thoughts shattered when he realized that what he’d wanted his whole life would mean ripping away the protections his mother had so carefully constructed for herself. He rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand, looked around in confusion like an answer might be lurking behind Logan’s plaid couch and then sat down with his fists clenched. 

Charles struck again. “Without proof, you’ll just be another wild conspiracy theorist. Poison in Genosha's well? It would just go on the list with those people who think mutant DNA was seeded by aliens to prepare for a space invasion and those other people who think Yoda was a prophet and George Lucas was an actual Jedi. If anyone tries to take you seriously, the Humanity First crowd will call it fake news and you’ve got nothing in response to that.” He was being harsh, yes, but it was better than letting Erik dedicate himself to plans that would cause too much conflict in a country already torn apart ideologically.

Erik’s brooding silence floated in the air with the smell of sausage until Logan said to Marie, “Hey! I didn’t even tell you the good news about today!”

With the change of subject, Charles chatted and smiled, and even coaxed a smile from Erik in response to Logan’s plans for a new house. They ate potatoes and sausage with Logan talking about the crime statistics in different neighborhoods in Avalon. Charles made a mental note of the spice Logan used, because this was a cheap meal and he’d learned to use a potato peeler tonight.

They left shortly afterwards. Erik stayed quiet, his thoughts subsiding into pensiveness. Charles leaned his forehead against the glass of the car window and stayed silent too, with nothing more than a quick ‘bye’ when Erik dropped him off.

The intensity of Saturday evening meant that Charles hadn’t gotten a chance to ask Erik about this whole dating-or-not thing. And yes, he might be incredibly shallow, but whether or not he was dating Erik interested him more than how many mutants in Genosha could cause spontaneous explosions. Once Erik moved on from obsessing about Genosha, they needed to have a serious conversation.

Charles unrolled himself from his blanket cocoon and went to get a piece of bread for breakfast and use his new WalMart brand $20 single-cup coffee maker. He tried to distract himself from Monday morning worries by making plans for his next paycheck (a toaster) but it didn’t work. He felt sick at the thought of going to work today. Charles needed to talk to Shaw about the facts of the Lebrayton case so he could get the complaint amended before it was served. He’d been dreading the first time he would see Shaw since he’d sexually harassed him last Thursday. 

Charles decided that he didn’t like the word ‘harass.’ It didn’t sound serious enough. It sounded like you were just annoyed with someone. The word didn’t include enough connotations about the humiliation and fear you felt at being treated like an object instead of a person, and the dread that if you stood up for yourself, something worse would happen. It’s like you had to cooperate with the whole situation. They should call it ‘sexual degradation’ instead. 

At the office, Charles wrote his questions on post-it notes he stuck to a printout of the complaint and then went and tapped on Shaw’s door.

Shaw looked over, and if his smile had an extra element of gloating to it, Charles wouldn’t know because he was staring at the floor with shields like the Great Wall of China around his mind. “What can I help you with, Charles?”

Charles sat down and looked at a post-it note. “The Defendant’s reply to the first demand letter asked for more time. Did our client reply to that specifically?”

The conversation was very businesslike and stayed on point. Charles didn’t look at Shaw, not even once. When he was done with his questions, he said ‘thank you’ and walked out without waiting for a reply.

When he got back to his office, he wished he hadn’t said ‘thank you.’ What was he thanking Shaw for? Not throwing sex thoughts at him? Helping fix the complaint he’d filed to try and ruin Charles’ career? Why did he have to be so fucking polite to evil people? Charles sat there, churning with self-hatred, for at least half an hour before he could make himself start editing the complaint. He billed the entire half hour to the client.

* * *

Erik kept telling Charles what a great job he did amending the Lebrayton complaint, and it seemed to work. By the time they got the amended complaint filed at the end of the week, Charles seemed back to his usual sunny self. He even mentioned having breakfast with Erik again next Wednesday. They’d missed their weekly breakfast this week when Charles texted that he wasn’t feeling well and was going to get some extra sleep instead. It sounded like a brushoff, but then Charles had still talked to him at work. With Charles agreeing to come back to breakfast at Bella’s Cafe, Erik decided that everything was fine again.

“Logan said General Swann has already called and asked if he’d guest lecture at West Point. He’s pretty excited,” Erik said, pouring a stingy amount of syrup on pancakes he didn’t want. Erik didn’t really like pancakes or eggs. All the breakfast meat on the menu here was a pork product, so that left nothing but pancakes or eggs. But Charles wanted it, so Erik ate pancakes. 

“Guest lecture? Is that what the military calls reminiscing?” Charles replied.

Erik almost launched into everything he wanted to say about Logan and Genosha, but he didn’t need Charles telling him to just ignore what he knew about Genosha again. Erik had a lot of experience in compartmentalizing, so he tucked Genosha away into a not-Charles pocket of his brain to think about later.

Instead he said, “Halloween is coming up.”

“Is there anything to do in Avalon for Halloween?”

Erik’s mind went staggering through all of the wonderful things he wanted to do with Charles for Halloween, but most of them were indecent. He was about to say ‘no,’ when he remembered something. “My neighbor is having some friends over for drinks and movies. Want to come with me?” She’d invited Erik for the past two years too, and he’d turned her down every time. She’d said to let him know if he changed his mind though, and now he’d changed his mind. 

Charles mixed up another bite of bacon with fruit and ate it. Erik thought that was the weirdest thing he’d ever seen, but Charles seemed to like it. “Do you think they’ll mind that I’m a telepath?”

“Why would they?”

“Erik!” Charles sounded aggravated. 

“She’s a telepath too, Charles.”

Charles looked up from his bacon and fruit mishmash. When those wide set blue eyes were full of hope and vulnerability like that, it made Erik want to fight the entire world to protect him.

“My neighbor is the telepath who just got into medical school. Jean Grey. Remember I told you about her?”

“Another telepath? I could meet another telepath? One with a heart? One who isn’t Emma Frost?” Charles sounded almost reverent, and Erik was thrilled he’d done something that made Charles so happy.

“I’ll tell her we’re coming,” Erik said, and then he thought of something he ought to clarify. “Just as friends. This isn’t a date.”

“Alright, Erik,” Charles said, mixing the bacon and fruit with pancakes and syrup. The only reason Erik didn’t think Charles’ eating habits were disgusting was because it was Charles. If it was anyone else, Erik would never have eaten with them again.

“Okay,” Erik said, happy he’d navigated the minefield of setting up some social time with Charles. Charles hadn’t brought up what Erik had said at his parents’ house about why he wasn’t asking Charles out, so Erik assumed he’d accepted the situation. Erik was always relieved to avoid a conversation about relationships. 

* * *

Pretending nothing happened when Shaw was around was easier than Charles thought it would be. It was easier than it should have been, actually. When he had to talk to Shaw, Charles would be breezy and agreeable, anything to keep from confronting what had happened. He was the model employee. He even had conversations with Janos, feeling like he was betraying Erik with every friendly word. Did Janos think Charles was siding with him against Erik? Did Erik think that?

Then after Shaw or Janos left, he would hate himself for making it so easy for Shaw to pretend he hadn’t done anything wrong. It was like he was cooperating with Shaw. At least Erik was awkward and agitated. You could tell something was wrong with Erik. Charles was the master of the ‘I’m fine’ facade, and that was a really sad skill to have. Shaw was enough of a creep to think that the way he treated Charles was no big deal, and Charles was going along with it. 

It was still happening, too, infrequently enough that Charles could cling to the hope that this was the last time Shaw would do it -- the last time he’d force a creepy thought into Charles’ mind, the last time he would stand too close, the last time he would try to touch Charles’ face. Really, the last time Shaw had cornered him in the copy room, all he’d done was stand too close and smell Charles’ hair. Charles had jerked away from him, eyes wide with surprise, and Shaw smiled at him and moved his hand as if he wanted to cup Charles’ cheek. Charles had hurried out of the copy room, forgetting his originals, insides clenched and humiliation pouring like acid over him. He’d sat in his office, taking deep breaths and insisting that nothing had happened and he shouldn’t be this upset. It could take an hour to calm down enough to get back to work, time lost from his billable quota. 

Then the next time he saw Shaw, Shaw would be professional and pleasant, leaving Charles wondering if he really was over-sensitive. Maybe Shaw just needed to inhale at the exact second his face was close to Charles’ head. Really, was he expecting Shaw to stop breathing so Charles wouldn’t feel harassed? Sometimes Charles wished Shaw would do something overtly sexual, like grab his crotch, so he could defend himself against something clearly over the line. This ambiguous harassment really messed with his head, because he didn’t even know if he could call it sexual harassment. 

Fight, flight, freeze or appease. Those were the four reactions to being threatened. Charles was an appeaser. If Shaw didn’t force anything, Charles wasn’t going to confront him about the behavior that made him uncomfortable. He’d lose. Without Erik’s help (and Charles kept all the ongoing harassment from Erik), he knew he would lose if he tried to stand up for himself; that made him both a coward and a loser.

The other reason he couldn’t make a public accusation against Shaw was because someone might pick up on his name and send the story viral. The Xaviers weren’t often in the news. Cutting off the heir without a penny would have made the gossip columnists salivate, but his mother had kept it quiet, for reasons Charles could only guess at. Perhaps she was waiting for him to come crawling home before their dirty laundry was aired on social media. 

Accusing Shaw of sexual harassment would invite publicity, and someone would eventually ask why the Xavier heir was working at a place like Frost & Shaw, and then the story would be all about the Xavier family drama rather than about Shaw’s creepy behavior. Shaw’s ability to take any attack and turn the force of it back on the attacker applied in ways that went beyond physical. He knew that Charles wouldn’t make a public fuss about how he was being treated; the publicity would hurt him more than it would hurt Shaw.

If it hadn’t been for Marie, Charles might have slid into a permanent funk. Marie and Logan both had cell phones now, and he’d been the recipient of Marie’s first text message. She apologized again for hurting him when Charles had been trying to help her the first time they met. Charles, in an attempt to assure her that he wasn’t afraid of being around her, insisted on getting together again to try and see if Charles could somehow help. Marie hesitantly agreed.

The tutorials were a smashing success. By the third time they got together, Marie petted a cat with her bare hand and cried with joy. Logan kept clearing his throat and saying, “well, how about that!” 

Charles knew he hadn’t done very much. In Marie’s memories of hurting others, there were a few seconds of contact that were safe; her powers took those few seconds to latch onto someone’s life essence. What Charles had done was give her back the confidence for a few seconds of contact. 

“Do you think you could try leaving your gloves off at work for a few minutes?” Charles asked.

Marie was a cashier at a gas station convenience store. Bare hands meant risking brushing someone’s skin when she gave them change.

“Only when you’re confident and relaxed. Everyone has a harder time controlling their powers when they’re nervous,” Charles went on.

“Shake my hand, Marie, for practice,” Logan said, stuffing the cigar in his mouth and sticking his hand out. “Come on, you know you can’t hurt me.”

Marie stood up and took Logan’s hand. “Hi, I’m Marie. It’s nice to meet you.”

“Hi, I’m Logan. Anyone who wants to date you can call me Wolverine.”

Marie laughed. Then she offered her hand to Charles. Charles doubled up on his shields, setting a barrier around the area where Marie’s power had latched onto him last month. Then he shook Marie’s bare hand, letting go within the three second margin that he believed was Marie’s safety point. 

“We’ll keep going, right Charles?” she asked.

“Yes, of course, this is the best part of my week.” Perhaps he could come up with something to extend that three seconds to five or six seconds. He still thought modified mental shielding might help.

“Oh, go on with you. You’re too nice about helping me.”

Charles sensed that it would ruin the mood if he insisted on the truth, which is that helping Marie really was the best part of his week. His Wednesday breakfast with Erik was a close second, but working with Marie was a whole new level of excitement for him.

Charles felt happy, all the way down to his toes, in a way he had never felt before. He’d never helped someone just for the sake of helping them before. Marie could never pay him back, and he didn’t care. Just watching her happiness filled up a need in Charles’ heart that he didn’t even know he needed until Marie made him crave that feeling again.

* * *

Halloween was on a Thursday this year. Attorneys did not take the day off for Halloween. They also didn’t wear costumes, or plan on giving candy to trick-or-treaters. Charles darkly wondered if they would give out candy if the child signed a waiver. Or threatened to sue for deprivation of some sort of childhood right rooted in common law. He should look that up sometime. Then he could recruit clients under age ten and file a class action lawsuit against Shaw for candy deprivation and sue for a truckload of Tootsie Pops. 

Just for the hell of it, Charles bought a bag of fun-size candy bars and filled a bowl outside the front porch, downstairs at his building, with a sign saying ‘Please Take Only One or the Ghost Will Haunt You.’ He taped a ghost he’d bought from Wal-Mart for $2.99 to the door frame. He fully expected everything to be gone before he got home. Hell, he expected everything to be gone before Erik even picked him up. He stared at his small Halloween display and decided it would be a test of the world’s common decency. If everything got stolen, the whole planet sucked and he would stop trying so hard to be optimistic in spite of Shaw. If the ghost and bowl were still here when he got back, then there were decent people in the world and Shaw was a fluke. People like Erik. Erik would obey the sign, Charles thought with a fond smile. 

Charles was wearing the cashmere-blend black sweater Erik had bought him, with khakis and loafers, also purchased by Erik. The air was cold, but it hadn’t snowed yet. At some point, he needed to buy boots. He should do that before Erik bought him boots. Also a coat. Wal-Mart had coats for $150, and New2You sold used coats for $45. Charles was weighing his options, remembering last winter when he couldn’t decide between three coats, and he bought them all. What an over-privileged brat he’d been at this time last year. Charles forced himself to stop shivering, because he suspected Erik would stop at Patagonia and buy him a coat tonight if he saw Charles shivering. 

He couldn’t wait in his apartment though because this was _ not _ a date. Friends just swung by to pick you up from the sidewalk outside your apartment building. If it was a date, then Erik should parallel park and come through the outside door and walk up three flights to knock on his door, or at least text from the landing. Erik was not picking up a date; he was picking up a friend to go to a party. As _ friends. _ Erik had been very clear about that. Erik had been so clear about that, Charles was wondering if he ought to be offended. Or he should talk to Erik about dating. Charles shied away from that idea; dating hurt. They were better as friends.

Charles hadn’t tried to date in almost two years. After Bruno dumped him, he’d gotten on Grindr like every other gay man. It was horrifying. Within minutes of signing up, he got six dick pics. Then messages started coming, most of them telling Charles what he should do with his mouth. If he was willing to bottom, he could have had a hook up every night. Charles was not willing to bottom with a stranger, not after Bruno. He put right in his profile that he would only do hand jobs on a first date. He was pretty sure no one ever read that line. After blocking about 78 people, he managed to exchange several messages with someone who didn’t call him a twink. They arranged to meet. He didn’t show. Charles never heard from him again. He endured another month of people fetishizing his mouth to the point that he started to get self-conscious every time he ate in public. Then he deleted the app, because why carry sexual assault around with you on your phone?

Gay bars weren’t much better, but he blamed that on his telepathy. It was disconcerting to be thought of as meat rather than as a person by an entire roomful of people.

He wondered if he were the only gay man who found meaningless hookups to be depressing. In the spring of his 2L year, eight months after breaking up with Bruno, he decided to unethically research that question. He went to a gay bar, bought himself a drink, and read every mind in the place. Lots were just cruising for sex. But some of the others were lonely -- bone deep, soul crushingly lonely, the kind of lonely that can only be cured by someone who wanted to know what you were like as a child, who would spend hours planning what to get you for your birthday, and who would scrape frost off your car windows before leaving for work just because he loved you; not the kind of lonely that can be cured by sex. 

Encouraged, Charles picked out a lonely man who was about his size and tried to strike up a conversation. The man, Devyn, tried to brush him off, and Charles wouldn’t let him. After all, they were both lonely. He’d come around. Devyn finally told Charles right out that he wasn’t his type. Charles dipped into his mind and found out that Devyn’s type was tall, ripped and would make everyone who had ever brushed Devyn off insanely jealous. As a law student who was a bit shorter than average and did not have a six-pack, Charles didn’t measure up.

That was how he found out that lonely people are very bad at figuring out what will make them less lonely.

Charles swore off dating, and poured his energy into getting excellent grades and strengthening the friendships he had with the law review board members. He was still lonely, but it wasn’t the constant in-your-face pain it used to be. Perhaps being lonely was better than being used for sex by someone who barely knew his name. Was it alright to make dating decisions based on what hurts less? Was that cowardly? Or good sense?

Then he’d met Erik, who had his dating history and sexuality so thoroughly blocked that Charles didn’t even know he was gay until a store clerk assumed they were boyfriends. Erik liked talking to him, liked spending time with him, and was more helpful than Charles was comfortable with. Also gorgeous. Charles spitefully wished he could show up at the gay bar with Erik and smirk in Devyn’s general direction and then kiss Erik while Devyn watched. With tongue.

Charles hadn’t been unconscious when Erik carried him home after Marie’s power drained him, just dazed. Whether or not he remembered it all accurately, his imagination was more than willing to fill in the blank places - the smell of Erik’s neck where his face had pressed, the scrape of his stubble over Charles’ forehead, the strength of his arms wrapped so securely around him that he didn’t even worry about being dropped. These past few weeks, he’d wrung every bit of safety and comfort out of that memory to try and keep the fear of Shaw at bay. 

Erik pulled up to the curb. Charles got into the car, and decided that he needed to talk to Erik about what he’d said at his parents’ house about dating. The worst that could happen is he would destroy the only friendship he had and make work even more horrifically awkward than it already was.

Fine, never mind.

* * *

“Charles needs furniture,” Erik said.

Charles gave him a sharp look, and might have said something, but Scott replied instantly.

“Great! That will save me the cost of a storage unit.”

Jean poked her boyfriend in the ribs with her elbow. “Maybe you should ask him if he really wants your ratty mustard-yellow bachelor couch first.”

“He’s a guy. The couch is comfy to crash on, and it’s free. What else matters?” Scott replied.

“He’s gay. They have more standards. Charles, you don’t have to take the shitty couch just because Scott can’t bear to part with it,” Jean said. 

“That’s actually a myth,” Erik said. “Gay people can be just as bad at interior decorating and picking out clothes as straight people.”

Charles quirked his eyebrows at him and Erik wondered why. Charles shouldn’t be irritated that Erik said that; he was just pushing back against a gay stereotype that wasn’t true. No one who knew Charles would believe that all gay men were fashionistas.

Jean pointed at Charles. “Do you see what he’s wearing? No man who wears a Peter Millar cashmere sweater would be able to tolerate your couch.”

“I picked that out,” Erik said.

“Ha! See? Even gay couples have one person who gripes about what the other person wears!” Scott announced triumphantly.

“Charles, are you the Scott in this relationship?” Jean asked him.

“We’re not dating,” Erik said immediately.

“Whatever,” Scott said. “If you’re dressing someone, you’re dating him. It’s like a rule.”

“That’s not a rule!” Erik protested. Oh, damn, was that a rule?

“Excuse me! I’m getting a word in edgewise now!” Charles practically hollered. “Scott and I are going to stand over there and talk about furniture without any input from you two.” Charles grabbed Scott by the sleeve and hauled him away.

“Honestly, you’d think it would be easy to move in together,” Jean said, rolling her eyes. “But instead it’s like this diplomatic crisis every time I say I don’t want his bachelor pad furniture. Does it look like I need more furniture?” She waved her hand around at her apartment with a laugh.

“No, you already have furniture,” Erik replied seriously. Jean gave him that look that Erik interpreted to mean that he’d said something not quite right. The look was quizzical, like the person was trying to figure out if Erik was trying to be funny and doing it badly, or if there was something wrong with him. He started to get agitated at the thought that Jean would figure out he was neurodivergent and then start treating him differently. The party had been going well so far. There were only eight people here, and the music wasn’t very loud. The sound on the TV was turned off entirely, so Erik could hear himself talk and think. The lights were dim. The environment wasn’t overwhelming, no worse than a classy restaurant, and he’d been doing just fine with Charles right next to him. Erik latched onto the thought of Charles, so that’s what he talked about. 

“Charles doesn’t have any furniture. I loaned him some stuff. But I hope he says yes to taking Scott’s furniture. Sometimes Charles gets touchy about people helping him,” Erik said.

“Yeah, no one wants to be a charity case. Maybe they can trade. You guys are lawyers, right? Scott needs to sue his work. Scott!” Jean hollered in Scott’s direction. “Charles is a lawyer! Tell him he doesn’t have to take your shitty couch if he’ll help you get a day off!”

Scott took the four steps to rejoin Erik and Jean by the drinks table, Charles following him. “I showed him a picture of my couch, and he said he doesn’t think it’s ugly.”

“Bit of an over-statement, but the couch won’t clash with the rest of my decor,” Charles said with a shrug. “What’s this about a day off?”

Erik tried to puzzle out what the rest of Charles’ decor was while Scott explained the problem, with Jean throwing in comments when she didn’t think Scott was outraged enough. Scott could generate force-based destructive beams from his eyes. He worked for Avalon Demolitions. The company held the license that allowed Scott to use his mutation in controlled circumstances for specific purposes, like demolishing a condemned building or breaking up overburden from an open-pit mine. Avalon Demolition had to file forms with the Occupational Safety and Health Administration before and after Scott blew something up. In the four years Scott had worked there, Avalon Demolition had reduced the rest of their blasting crew until Scott was handling about two-thirds of their demolition jobs. 

“It’s great for the company. They’re saving all kinds of money not buying explosives and not paying salaries for baseline explosives experts, but I’m still making the same salary. It’s a good salary, but it’s not like I get a profitability bonus. But what really bites is that I can’t use my time off. They laid off most of their baselines, so I have to pick up the slack, right? They schedule jobs for me too close. Most of them are out-of-state anymore, so I’ve got all this travel,” Scott said. “They figure as long as I’m in another city, I may as well work a twelve-hour day because what else am I going to do? But it’s not like they let me take comp time later to make up for it. You know how your vacation days expire if you don’t use them? Last year, I lost 12 days of paid vacation. Twelve days! That’s going to happen again this December. I can’t get a day off! No one can cover for me!” 

“What happens when you ask for time off?” Erik asked.

“They say no,” Scott said. That red-tinted visor over his eyes made it really easy for Erik to look right at him, even though he’d just met Scott tonight. No real eye contact. “Once I pushed it, and they threatened to fire me if I didn’t show up for the job.”

“Aren’t there any other demolition companies in Avalon? It seems to me that you’re the one with the marketable skill,” Charles said.

“Avalon Demolitions holds the MPAL,” Erik told Charles. Didn’t Charles take Mutant Law in law school? He should know this. “Scott can only use his power at the company that holds the Mutant Power Authorization License, and OSHA will only grant it to one company at a time. Avalon Demolitions would have to voluntarily transfer the MPAL to a new employer. If they’re pissed at him, they can just keep his license, and Scott can never use his power unless they hire him back.”

“If another company wanted to buy my license, Avalon Demolitions could jack up the price to the millions if they wanted to. No one would pay that,” Scott said.

“Didn’t the Thirteenth Amendment ban slavery?” Charles demanded.

“We think of it more as indentured servitude without an end date,” Jean said.

“Either way, Avalon Demolitions controls my MPAL, so that means they control me,” Scott said. “If I can’t use my mutation, the only other job I’m really qualified for is barista.”

“Don’t flatter yourself, sweetie, you make terrible coffee,” Jean said.

Scott huffed at her. “You just need a sugar daddy to get you through med school.”

“Damn right I do,” Jean said. They laughed and kissed lightly.

“Can we challenge the Mutant Power Authorization Licensing statute?” Charles asked.

“No, that’s a federal statute, and it’s been upheld by the Supreme Court because mutants don’t have a constitutional right to use their powers under the _ Eisenhardt v. United States _ case,” Erik said.

“Damn Eisenhardt!” Scott and Jean chorused together.

Erik understood why people said that, but it still made him flinch.

Charles carefully didn’t look at him. Erik had asked him to keep his connection to Eisenhardt a secret, and Charles had rolled his eyes and said ‘obviously.’

“Couldn’t we lobby to get it amended? Like allow OSHA to grant the license to more than one company at a time? Or require a company to transfer the license to a new company at the request of the mutant?” Charles suggested.

“Those are great ideas, but they’ve already been tried,” Erik said. Congress had no stomach for making life easier for mutants by amending a law that was so popular with baseline humans.

“That won’t help before his vacation days expire on December 31st anyway,” Jean said.

“Wait, though,” Erik paused to think. “If they’re not giving you days off, they might be running afoul of the Fair Labor Standards Act. Pennsylvania has some employee protection statutes too. Let me look up some stuff and put together a letter to send your employer. I bet we can come up with something to get a discussion going.”

“Wait, this was supposed to be my project, to pay back Scott for the furniture,” Charles objected.

“I don’t need free legal help,” Scott said. “I get paid well. I can hire Erik. Don’t worry about it, Charles. You’re saving me the cost of a storage unit by taking my furniture, remember?”

Erik glanced at Charles. It was clear to him that Charles didn’t even know where to start on a project like this, and Scott wanted Erik to work on it. But Charles would probably get upset if he couldn’t do anything to pay Scott back for the furniture. “Do you have any other problems that Charles could help you with?”

That made Scott’s mouth twist into something that was more grimace than smile. “I’ve got a problem that no one can help with.”

“What is it?” Erik pressed.

“My kid brother. He’s got a power like mine, only a hundred times harder to control. Last time he got himself arrested, he begged for solitary confinement. He either destroys other stuff, or he self-destructs and no one knows what to do. It’s killing me to watch him,” Scott said.

“That’s perfect!” Erik declared. “Charles is already helping a girl who can kill people just by touching them! He’s really good at stuff like that!”

“When can I meet your brother?” Charles asked, setting down his beer to pull out his phone.

“You’re serious?” Scott said. “I’ll buy you a brand new couch if you can help my brother!” 

“Oh, no you don’t! You are not finding a way to keep your couch!” Jean said.

Scott hip-checked her while putting Charles’ contact info into his phone.

“I’ll take the couch, Jean, and now you owe me a favor!” Charles said with a laugh, and smiled at Erik. Erik smiled back, relieved things were going so well.

* * *

They left the party about an hour later. Everyone else was still there, but Erik and Charles had work tomorrow. Besides, Erik’s limit for an unfamiliar social situation was about two hours. No matter how much fun it was, navigating all the people was exhausting. The longer he was there, the more likely he was to do something wrong.

“Sorry you have to drive across town for me twice,” Charles said, letting himself into the car as soon as Erik’s power flicked against the locks. “I’m going to buy a car during the year-end sales.”

“I’ll come car shopping with you. I like cars. And you don’t live across town; it’s barely five miles away,” Erik replied.

“When do I get to pay you back for all of this, my friend?” Charles asked him.

Oh, damn, was he doing too much again? But car shopping wasn’t a favor. Car shopping was way fun. Erik traded out cars every two years, just because he liked shopping for cars so much. His dad always came with him, and they spent the entire day together. Come to think of it, he could sell Charles this Mazda Miata for a great price and then go buy a Nissan Rogue, cinnamon red, with leather seats. He’d already talked to his dad about the Nissan. Or would Charles think he was doing too much again? Erik spent too much time trying to think of how to answer Charles and didn’t say anything at all before he was pulling up in front of Charles’ brownstone.

“Look! The ghost is still there!” Charles pointed at a ghost made out of starched white netting taped to the door frame. “Even the bowl! I thought for sure everything would get stolen!”

Erik wanted to ask why Charles left things out to get stolen, but he didn’t have time before Charles turned towards him and kept talking. “Tonight was marvelous, absolutely marvelous. Thanks for introducing me to your friends. I’m thrilled to meet Alex Summers! I can’t even tell you!” Then he grabbed Erik’s face, turned him to look out the windshield, and planted a kiss on Erik’s cheek. “That was just as friends, because I know we’re just friends. G’night, Erik! Happy Halloween!”

Charles was out of the car before Erik could respond at all. Erik watched him run up to the porch. He looked in the bowl, then waved a couple of candy bars at Erik with a thumbs-up and unlocked the door, balancing the ghost, bowl and candy bars.

Erik’s fingers went to his cheek. Not dating Charles was the best relationship he’d ever been in.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Charles' bad experiences on Grindr and at gay bars are loosely based on this article from the Huffington Post:  
[Epidemic of Gay Loneliness](https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/gay-loneliness/)


	12. Alex

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Charles checks a website, meets Alex and finally has a long talk with Erik about not dating him.

Every so often, Charles checked the Xavier Pharmaceuticals website for press releases. They’d been coordinating with the Gates Foundation on drugs to treat ringworm in Africa for a couple of years now, and that got touted for all the positive publicity that they could wring out of it. There was a photo of Bill and Melinda Gates with lab techs in white coats at a clinic in Botswana. 

Another press release announced that clinical trials for the latest blood pressure medication were showing positive results.

There wasn’t anything about the Novogene lawsuit. That wasn’t good news, so it didn’t get added to the bragfest that made up the newsfeed on the Xavier Pharmaceuticals website. The appellate briefs had been submitted, but oral argument hadn’t been scheduled. Sometimes if the facts were straightforward enough, a case was submitted on the briefs without oral argument. The facts in the Novogene case were straightforward. 

Twelve years ago, when Dr. Kurt Marko was working at Mevion-Chiyoda Pharmaceuticals, he’d been researching a drug named choramzin that he hoped would treat Alzheimers. It didn’t work. Undeterred, Dr. Marko started testing choramzin’s effects in treating epilepsy. He made enough progress that they ran a few careful tests on epileptics. The results were promising but inconclusive. Rather than design another test, Dr. Marko decided that the drug was ineffective in preventing seizures, and convinced top management that choramzin was a dead-end drug and no further research should be conducted on its uses.

Two months after that, Dr. Marko left Mevion-Chiyoda. Four months after he’d stopped work on choramzin as an anti-seizure drug, Dr. Marko was working at Xavier Pharmaceuticals on a new drug he’d named Novogene. 

It took five years before Mevion-Chiyoda realized that Novogene was choramzin.

In an oversight that got most of the Human Resources Department fired, Mevion-Chiyoda had failed to have Dr. Marko sign a nondisclosure/noncompete agreement. When Dr. Marko joined Xavier Pharmaceuticals, he brought with him his lab notebook (scientists still called it a lab notebook even though it was a flash drive) filled with choramzin research. The legal issue in the Novogene lawsuit was whether or not Mevion-Chiyoda owned Dr. Marko’s lab notebook even though he hadn’t signed the nondisclosure/noncompete agreement. The factual issue was how much of the Novogene development came from the lab notebook, and how much came from Dr. Marko’s general knowledge of the drug he used to call choramzin. The overriding issue was which company should own the Novogene drug and its profits.

The Novogene drug was a mutation suppressant.

At Charles’ job interview with Yates, Mahtam & Anuwat six months ago, nearly all of the conversation had focused on the Novogene case. At the time, Charles had thought that meant he was so qualified for the job that they were just making conversation about a popular case. After his mother reminded him that Yates, Mahtam & Anuwat represented Mevion-Chiyoda, he realized they’d been pumping him for information.

“I find it fascinating that your country’s Food and Drug Administration has allowed clinical trials of the Novogene drug to begin when it isn’t even known which company will have legal rights to the profits,” Anuwat had said. Charles had been so flattered that a named partner of one of the world’s premiere law firms had flown to the United States from Singapore for his job interview. “Do you have any insight into that?”

Sharon had pushed Charles to the edges of the case, and he really only knew what reporters posted online. It was common knowledge that, pursuant to a stipulation approved by the judge, all of Xavier Pharma’s costs in testing the drug were to be paid back by Mevion-Chiyoda if Mevion-Chiyoda ultimately prevailed in the case. He fell back on what the news sites were saying. “As the only mutation suppressant drug that has no effect on baselines, the drug is too important to delay development.”

The problem with the two mutation suppressant drugs currently on the market was the huge red warning label on the box: WARNING: MAY CAUSE PERMANENT INJURY OR DEATH IF TAKEN BY INDIVIDUALS WITHOUT A MUTATION, OR BY AN INDIVIDUAL WHOSE MUTATION IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH THIS DRUG. 

Existing mutation suppressants worked by interfering with the additional cellular functions in mutants; if no mutant cellular functions existed, the drug interfered with whatever other cellular functions were available, like metabolism, digestion and respiration. In other words, if a baseline took a mutation suppressant, the drug would either shut down their intestines, destroy the lining of the lungs or interfere with the ability to metabolize nutrients. In contrast, Novogene worked by targeting the area of the brain that controlled mutant abilities. It had no effect on baseline brains.

The other advantage to Novogene is it worked on both categories of mutation without harming the other category. The current categorization of mutations was based on which suppressant drug worked. Physical Enhancement mutations could be suppressed by Physitrol. That category took in all mutants whose powers were reflected physically, from Raven’s shape-shifting to Logan’s healing to Angel’s flight to the preternaturally fast reflexes that made up about 60% of all mutations. 

Energy Field Manipulation mutations could be suppressed by Neutrol. Energy Field mutations included any non-physical mutation, from Emma Frost’s telepathy to Scott Summers’ force beams to Jean Grey’s telekinesis to Sebastian Shaw’s ability to manipulate kinetic energy. 

Giving a Physically Enhanced mutant the Energy Field suppressant would not only fail to suppress the physical mutation, it would cause psychosis. Giving an Energy Field mutant a Physical Enhancement suppression would not only fail to suppress the energy field ability, it would cause severe digestive tract damage.

Because of the life-threatening risks, the current suppressant drugs were used in only the most extreme circumstances.

The Novogene drug would be a total game-changer. It targeted only mutant abilities, and would not cause side effects in either baselines or mutants if the wrong person took it.

“As a mutant yourself, are you concerned that medically suppressing mutations will become more common if a safer drug is available?” Aidah had asked during his job interview.

“Of course that’s likely to be a result,” Charles had answered. “But the important point to keep in mind is that right now, some mutants who would benefit from suppressants are currently going untreated. If those needs are met, of course suppressant use will become more common, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing.” By articulating the baseline arguments, Charles could lessen a lot of the nervousness baselines felt about interacting with a telepath. He wanted this job; there was no need to come across as a mutant rights activist.

“So even when you take control of the company in a couple of years, you’ll continue the FDA trials and get Novogene on the market?” Anuwat had asked. He’d had strong shields up, and Charles was obeying the Casey-Kenton Standards for the Ethical Use of Telepathy with such devotion that he could barely sense that other minds were in the room during this interview.

“Yes, of course that’s my intention,” Charles had answered without a pause.

In hindsight, that’s what Mevion-Chiyoda hadn’t known that it needed to know: the future owner of Xavier Pharmaceuticals would continue to develop and market Novogene.

He could be so stupid sometimes.

* * *

Erik invited himself along when Charles met Alex Summers. Scott was also coming because he was bringing Alex, and Jean was coming because this was interesting, and she had a doctor friend who wanted to come and observe. Alex’s parents, Katherine and Christopher Summers, were coming because Alex still lived at home when he wasn’t in jail, and they were desperate with the hope that Charles might be able to help him. With all those people coming anyway, Erik invited Marie and Logan along, because he thought Marie might want to meet someone else with a dangerous mutation. Logan was just nice to have around. He’d closed on a house two weeks ago, a four bedroom bungalow built in the 1970s that needed lots of remodeling. The floors were already torn up and Logan had bought all-new power tools. Erik loved power tools.

“You invited how many people?” Charles demanded.

Erik shrugged. The whole thing might have had something to do with his mother’s daily phone calls about being careful to keep his own powers a secret, while still finding a way to get Charles to help him control his own mutation. Erik didn't think that was necessary, but this way he got to spend a Saturday with Charles and make his mom happy all at the same time. Definitely a win-win.

For Erik, at least.

“If I fail, I’d like to have a slightly smaller audience,” Charles said. 

“You can’t fail; you’re perfect,” Erik replied with a grin. It didn’t seem to reassure Charles, but then Erik’s smiles were more frightening than reassuring. Even his mom said that.

Scott reserved the local gym for the meeting; he said his brother might need some room and it was too cold outside. Of course, he couldn’t tell the rec center that he wanted a space for destructive mutants to practice their powers indoors, so they were all in gym shorts and bouncing basketballs.

Charles in a tank top and gym shorts. Another win for Erik.

Jean Gray walked into the gym, wearing leggings and a tank top. But it was her companion who drew everyone’s attention. He was bigger than Logan, and bright blue. With fur. As if that didn’t make him stand out enough, he was wearing a suit and tie in a basketball gym. Also glasses. It was as if he thought he could camouflage the terrifying badass exterior by dressing like a frumpy old man. If Erik looked like that, he’d go naked, except for a cape. Capes were awesome. All of Erik’s childhood Halloween costumes included capes, even the animals.

“Hey doc!” Logan was the first one to greet the big blue mutant. When introductions went around the circle, Erik found out that this was the doctor who had referred Logan to him.

“I try to keep track of mutants who help other mutants,” the big blue doc explained in a voice that seemed too light to come from such a broad chest. “We need some sort of mutant services center to provide information about resources.”

“Sounds like it should be a website,” Jean said.

“That’s too public. It would attract persecution,” said Dr. Hank, as he insisted on being called. (Apparently calling him Dr. McCoy resulted in too many Star Trek jokes and he was afraid he might accidentally kill the next person who suggested he say ‘dammit, Jim, I’m a doctor, not Stitch on steroids!’) “I want something small and local. Just for us. I’m here to see if I can add you to my resource list.” Dr. Hank said this last sentence to Charles. “We’ve got nothing for teenage mutants with dangerous powers. They end up in jail or on the streets, and once they turn 18, they get shipped right into the Restricted Socialization Program for Mutants with Dangerous Abilities.” 

Dr. Hank pursed his lips at that, and all of them nodded solemnly. Erik’s mom’s biggest fear if anyone found out that he was metallokinetic is that he would be blocked instantly. Her second biggest fear was that he’d get processed into the Restricted Socialization Program for Mutants with Dangerous Abilities and essentially spend the rest of his life on house arrest without an Internet connection or a phone. Apparently, if you had an uncontrollable dangerous mutation, you would start plotting to take over the world, and cutting off your access to the world made the humans feel safer. Erik thought that concern had merit; he regularly thought about how to take over the world. He doubted Marie did, though. Danger was more about personality than ability, really. That wasn’t the sort of distinction paranoid baselines would appreciate though.

“Alex turns 18 in five months,” Jean said. “Where are they?” She checked her phone for texts. “Oh, Alex slept in.”

Now Charles looked really nervous. Being reminded that all of Alex’s constitutional rights to freedom of association and speech could be terminated in five months if he didn’t gain control of his powers could do that, Erik thought. He put a reassuring hand on Charles’ shoulder.

“Today’s just a meeting and evaluation,” Charles said to Dr. Hank. “I don’t know if I can help him.”

“Oh, Charles, you’ll do fine,” Marie said, giving Charles’ other shoulder a brief squeeze. She was barehanded, in a t-shirt and shorts. Marie was being careful to keep skin to skin contact to the briefest of touches, but just having her show up to a basketball game without gloves fitted up past her elbows was a victory for her. “I’ll tell him what you did for me. I bet he lets you read his mind today. That helped so much!”

Dr. Hank raised a blue eyebrow at Charles, and Charles explained how he’d used his telepathy to gain an understanding of Marie’s mutation and then used it to teach her some relaxation and shielding techniques. “It hasn’t eliminated the danger of her powers, but it has given her enough control to interact more normally,” he finished.

“Yesterday, I didn’t wear gloves at all!” Marie declared proudly. “I brought them today though.” She pulled a wad of cloth out of the pocket of her shorts. “You know how quick sports games can go bad.”

“That’s all Alex would need to avoid the Restricted Socialization Program. Proof of enough control to sustain normal interactions,” Dr. Hank said.

“Now you can start school,” Logan said.

Marie scowled at the floor. “Not yet.” Apparently, that was an ongoing argument.

“Finally!” Jean called out, and went to greet Scott, who was walking into the room next to a tall teenager with blonde hair, blue eyes, and an expression somewhere between hangdog and dangerous. He and his brother had the same jawline and mouths. Alex was an inch taller than Scott. Behind them were a human couple in their fifties wearing plastic smiles and fearful expressions. It reminded Erik of how his mom looked for years after his own mutation manifested. 

Alex didn’t offer to shake anyone’s hand during introductions, but he did nod at Charles. He stood there silently when Scott invited him to explain his mutation, so Scott said it for him. Both Scott and Alex were in the Energy Field Manipulation mutation category, but where Scott’s force beams were limited to his eyes, and could be controlled by either closing his eyes or wearing a ruby-quartz visor, Alex’s energy blasts poured out of his skin, and couldn’t be controlled. He also didn’t know what set off the discharge, though emotional turmoil was a factor.

Katherine Summers teared up, and tried to hide it, as Scott told about Alex’s arrest record while Alex scowled at the wall.

“Play ball, before they come and ask what we’re really doing,” Logan said, after Scott’s speech wound down. “You two do some one-on-one.” Logan tossed a ball to Charles and hooked a thumb at the other end of the gym. “The rest of us are playing Horse at this basket. Come on, Marie, you’re first. Shoot it like I taught you.”

Marie played timidly; Jean was cutthroat; Katherine went to sit on the bleachers and twist her hands while pretending not to steal glances at Alex, but Christopher stayed in the game and tried to joke around; Logan had some weird style that probably dated back to when they invented the game; Scott had crappy peripheral vision; and Dr. Hank took one shot that nearly cracked the backboard and went to join Katherine on the bleachers instead.

Erik decided stealing the ball from Logan was fair game because he wanted to run around, not just stand and shoot, and Logan didn’t seem to mind. After a while, he was in a pretty vicious game of one-on-one with Logan with the rest of the group watching from the bleachers.

“Not bad for an old man,” Erik said. He’d played forward on his high school basketball team, and all his competitiveness came back whenever he got a ball in his hands. 

“Watch it, whippersnapper, or I’ll make you eat the ball,” Logan flung back at him, then reached around Erik for a steal that would have been a foul in a real game, but Erik was fairly sure if there was no blood, he couldn’t call foul in this game.

Logan never got out of breath, no matter how hard he played. Erik tried to pretend he wasn’t gasping, but that wasn’t going to last. Still, he had a great hook shot. Marie cheered when he made it.

“Was that telekinesis or skill?” Logan jabbed at him.

“I can’t move a basketball,” Erik said with a laugh.

Logan gave him a measuring look, bouncing the ball he’d rebounded, then broke around Erik and shot a layup, which bounced wildly off the rim in a spiral. “You sure that wasn’t you?”

“I can’t move a basketball,” Erik insisted. “Tiny things like wires, like Charles said.” He didn’t have to make eye contact, which he couldn’t do while lying, because he chased the basketball and bounce passed it to Logan. Besides, he was only partially lying. A basketball was rubber; he couldn’t move it.

Logan grinned at him. “Have it your way.” Then he threw the ball to Marie, who was sitting on the bleachers talking to Dr. Hank while Katherine and Christopher listened. Jean and Scott were seated behind them, gazing dreamily into each others’ eyes. “Get back out here, girl! I’ve worn him out for you. You can beat Erik, now.” Under his breath, he said to Erik, “Go easy on her, or I might have to kill you.”

Erik turned to invite Marie back onto the court, and his gaze skimmed over Alex and Charles, who were seated on the bleachers on the far side of the gym. Charles’ back was to him, but he could see Charles had his fingers to his temple. 

Alex had his forehead down on his fists, elbows propped on his knees, when suddenly his body jerked and emitted something bright pink and glowing. Erik felt the plasma warp the magnetic field of the room. Instinctively, he threw Logan out of the way and set up a magnetic field line between the plasma and the walls of the gym, then dragged the plasma safely away from the people in the gym, holding it contained near the ceiling. Three lights shorted out in a shower of sparks.

Erik expanded and degraded the magnetic field in fits and starts, which allowed the plasma to separate out in chunks of just a few molecules each, cooling as it left the plasma stream and disappearing with a pop into the air. The effect looked like sparklers, and was just as harmless.

The whole episode, start to finish, lasted less than three seconds. Erik brought his hands down before Marie even finished her scream. Logan was still trying to get back to his feet from where Erik had thrown him to the top of the bleachers down at the other end of the gym, above Charles and Alex. Jean and Scott were looking around in confusion, having missed the entire thing. Dr. Hank was looking between Erik and Alex, not sure who was responsible for the fireworks.

Charles was advancing on him, fingers at his temple. _ Erik, what just happened? _

All Erik could think was _ oh, shit. _

_ That’s not really an explanation, _Charles replied drily.

“Whaddaya mean, you can’t move a basketball?” Logan bellowed at him, leaping down the bleachers with a horrific metal clang at each step.

“Oh!” Katherine cried out, and then burst into tears. The sobs didn’t stop her from talking. “Oh! You are going to be able to help him! He’s never done that before! He’s never been able to just make one of those blasts fizz out without hurting anything!” She stumbled down from the bleachers and grabbed Charles in a hug.

Katherine diverted the attention from Erik, and it seemed the rest of the group was willing to believe that Charles and Alex had somehow neutralized that plasma blast. Erik’s raised hands during the episode may have just looked like he was trying to shield himself. He relaxed as Dr. Hank started talking about how mental techniques could control any mutation and Scott went to punch his brother in the shoulder in what passed for affection between siblings. Jean shook Alex’s arm happily, and grinned at him; she must not have been paying any attention telepathically.

Logan watched the hubbub before turning a measuring look on Erik. Erik gave his head a tiny shake, and Logan nodded.

Marie was excitedly talking to Alex about the first time she’d felt in control of her powers, and even put a hand on Katherine’s arm. Christopher Summers was standing off to the side, letting the verbal excitement wash around him, looking stunned. He finally reached out, took Charles by the elbow, and pulled him away from the group. That gave Charles a second to gather himself up.

“Just a second, Mr. Summers, I want to just check if there are any aftershocks coming,” Charles said politely, fingers going to his temple.

“Of course,” Christopher said instantly.

_ Erik? _

_ Please take the credit, Charles. _ Erik tried to think hard and fast for something he could say, and he remembered when Charles lied about forgetting his wallet so Erik would buy his breakfast, and then not explaining himself afterward. _ I can’t get into a big explanation right now, but I can’t have people know I did anything. _

_ We’ll talk later. _

Erik didn’t reply to that.

Charles took his hand from his head and aimed a nervous smile at Christopher Summers. Alex was starting to look relieved and happy at what Marie was saying; perhaps he was beginning to believe that Charles had given him some control of his powers already. It was one of those big groups of people with everyone talking at once that Erik found so overwhelming. He liked the general excitement, but it was too much stimulation and input.

Erik drew back from the group to go sit on the bleachers. Logan sat next to him with a hand on his shoulder, adamantium-infused fingers nearly crushing bruises into his flesh. Erik didn’t force Logan’s grip to loosen.

“Shit you can’t talk about?”

Erik nodded fractionally. Logan had been at Genosha; he’d rescued Edie before the Siege started; he’d met Max and Wanda Eisenhardt in person. Logan was going to figure everything out, and then Erik would have broken the rule about never revealing what he could do. He started to sweat.

“I get it,” Logan said. 

Some of the tension let go of him. His mom had insisted for so long that revealing his powers would lead to his destruction that it had never once occurred to him that someone could find out, and not destroy him.

* * *

“Maybe Logan could drop you off at home. I’ve got to get something from the office,” Erik said to Charles as the entire group walked out of the rec center. The Summers family and Jean got into a mid-sized SUV after Charles confirmed with Katherine, for the third time, that he would get together with Alex again next Saturday. Logan drove a beat-up truck that Charles suspected he wouldn’t replace even now that he could afford a new one. Dr. Hank drove a tiny Prius; he almost had to fold himself up to get inside. Charles really wanted his own car, but not today. He’d been counting on the enforced chance to talk to Erik in private. 

Now he was getting an obvious brush-off. 

Charles didn’t reply to Erik’s suggestion. He just got in the car with Erik.

Erik got into the driver’s seat and began fumbling with his keys. Interesting. Charles had never seen Erik put keys in his ignition before. It looked like he’d forgotten how. Charles watched Erik start to sweat and drop his keys. They fell under the accelerator pedal, and Erik had to contort himself to try and reach them.

“Why don’t you just use your power to pick them up?” Charles asked.

“Um,” was Erik’s reply.

“Erik,” Charles prodded, even though he could feel Erik’s tension level ramping up.

“Fuck, Charles!” Erik snapped.

“No, we don’t talk about that either,” Charles said coolly. “Which conversation do you want to avoid this afternoon? We’ll have the other one.”

Charles meant to be ironic. Erik took him literally. “I want to avoid the powers conversation. Let’s talk about dating. Or not dating.”

With that settled, Erik picked up his keys with his power and then stuffed them into the pocket of his jacket. The car started without keys. Erik moved the gear shift into reverse, then turned the steering wheel as he backed out of the parking space.

“Could you drive without touching anything at all?” Charles inquired politely.

“We’re not talking about my mutation. We’re talking about dating,” Erik said doggedly. “You said I could avoid one of the conversations. Offer and acceptance makes a contract.”

“Mm.” You had to be careful what you said when you were dating a lawyer, or even not-dating a lawyer. Charles would have to remember that.

Charles didn’t say anything else. Erik drove them home. It was funny how Charles was beginning to think in terms of ‘home’ and ‘his apartment.’ ‘Home’ was Erik’s place. Charles had furniture now, but his apartment still didn’t feel like home. 

“Alright, so here’s the thing,” Erik said, the instant the door shut behind him, before either one of them had taken their jackets off. “I like you a lot, but I can’t date you while I’m your supervisor. I think we should just be friends until I’m not your supervisor.”

Charles unzipped his jacket, took it off, folded it and set it over the back of the recliner -- the chair Erik had sat in the night he’d carried Charles in from the car after Marie wiped him out. The apartment was a cluttered mess of Legos, junk mail, socks and fast food containers left wherever Erik had finished eating. “How long are you going to be my supervisor?”

“I don’t know. A couple years?” Erik floundered around the answer.

Charles raised an eyebrow at Erik. He was being mean, making Erik sweat bullets like this, but dammit it all to hell, he’d already been in one shitty relationship where he let his boyfriend call all the shots. He wasn’t doing that again. “So for the next couple years, I have to . . . what? Remain celibate? Not go out with anyone else? Know that you like me but you aren’t going to do anything about it? Why don’t you ask me what I want, Erik? Who put you in charge of the two of us?”

Erik gaped at him like a dying fish. Charles had knocked the words right out of him. He abruptly sat down on the edge of the couch, more of a collapse than anything else, and dug both hands into his hair and pulled. “I’m going to fuck this up, aren’t I?”

Oh, hell, when was Charles going to accept the fact that Erik had a hard time with social skills? Tormenting Erik wasn’t going to make him neurotypical. Charles blew out a long sigh, sat down next to Erik, and yanked on one of his hands until Erik let go of the hair he was pulling and let Charles hold it. “You blurted out what you want. Now it’s my turn. Okay?”

Erik nodded, staring at the floor.

“I like you a lot, but I don’t want to date you right now, either. For one thing, I need to be more independent. I want to pay you back for the clothes. That’s important to me, so I’m Venmoing you $50 per paycheck and you don’t argue with me about it, you understand?”

Erik nodded, staring at the floor.

“I had this bad relationship in law school. I don’t want to get into a mess like that again. You have to pay attention to what I want too. Okay?”

Erik nodded, staring at the floor.

Charles drew a breath to keep talking when Erik raised his hand. Like at school. Like to get called on.

“Yes, Erik?”

“What do you want?”

It took the building anger right out of Charles. He’d been getting worked up about Erik taking over his life, and Erik’s question made him realize what he was doing and what he wanted right now. Right now. Not long-term relationship goals, or what they would do in a couple years when Erik wasn’t his supervisor anymore, but right this minute.

“I want to tell you all about my shitty ex,” Charles blurted out. “I might cry.”

Erik got up and walked out of the room. 

Now Charles really was going to cry. 

Erik walked back into the room with a box of tissues that he handed to Charles. He sat down on the recliner, across from Charles.

“Sit here,” Charles ordered Erik, patting the couch cushion next to him.

Erik moved over.

“Now put an arm around me,” Charles said.

Erik put an arm around him. Charles kicked off his shoes and leaned on Erik’s side. It would have felt better if Erik wasn’t as stiff as a board. Also, he really needed a shower.

“Now ask me about my ex.”

“Tell me about your ex, Charles.”

“Do you even want to hear this? Or are you just following orders?” Charles demanded.

“You said to ask you! How can you get pissed at me when I do exactly what you tell me to do?” 

Charles glared at him. 

“The thing is, Charles, I’m always the shitty ex. What if you tell me about your shitty ex-boyfriend, and he’s exactly like me?” Erik’s voice was forlorn, full of the resignation that Charles would dump him eventually, so maybe they should get it over with now.

Charles had thought that only having had one boyfriend by age 23 was pretty lame. But having ten or a dozen people take your sex and then dump you within a couple months or refuse to date you at all apparently caused a fair amount of damage too. Seeing Erik hurt softened a lot of Charles’ defensiveness.

Charles pushed and prodded at Erik until he leaned back against the arm of the couch, and then Charles situated himself with his head on Erik’s chest right below the collarbone, and his arms around Erik’s waist. He nestled in like a cat -- Erik was still stiff -- until Erik put an arm around him and relaxed a bit. Charles felt the tension go out of him, not in relief, but in resignation. If this was the only time he could hold Charles, then he may as well have the memory.

There was no music, no tv, just the clock ticking and Erik beginning to run a hand up and down Charles’ bare arm.

“His name was Bruno,” Charles said at last. “He hurt me. I let him, because I was desperate to have a boyfriend.”

“He hit you?”

“No, he never hit me.” That would have been too obvious. “He hurt me when we had sex. Every time. It hurt, and I lied and said I was fine.”

“Oh.” Erik’s hand stilled on his arm. A few seconds passed in silence. “Charles, I’ll never hurt you. I promise.”

Charles nodded against Erik’s chest. “I think maybe that was all I needed to say about my shitty ex-boyfriend.” Then something wrenched deep in his chest and Charles started to cry. Once he started, he couldn’t stop. He cried out Bruno; he cried out every bad experience on Grindr; he cried out all his fear that he was bad at being gay.

Erik’s hand moved from Charles’ arm up into his hair. Every so often Erik handed Charles a new tissue when Charles threw a soaked one onto the floor.

It seemed like a lifetime, but it was only about thirty minutes later when Charles calmed down into hiccups and then slow breaths. “Erik, do you mind if I fall asleep on you?”

“Okay, Charles.”

“I want a blanket,” he mumbled.

A heavy fleece blanket floated over to the couch, reminding Charles of the conversation they hadn't had about Erik's powers. They would have to sort that out eventually. Erik tucked him in, kissed his hair, and shifted Charles to settle his arm more comfortably.

Not-dating Erik was the best thing that had ever happened to him, Charles thought as he drowsed off.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> It may be another month or more before the next update. Thanks to the two anons who checked in with me on
> 
> [Tumblr.](https://lindstrom2020.tumblr.com/)
> 
> That moved the story up a few spaces on the priority list.


	13. Overpass

No, Erik did not want to talk to Charles about his powers. However, he’d noticed that Charles had problems with his powers. There was the first episode with Marie, when Charles leaked his link with Marie out to Erik and Logan, and then let Marie latch onto his life essence and nearly got himself killed. When he’d met Alex, he’d somehow set off a plasma blast. Dr. Hank planned to refer more powerful mutants who couldn’t control their powers to Charles. Charles wasn’t the sort to care if he was putting himself at risk as long as he was trying to help someone, so Erik would have to worry on his behalf. He came up with a plan.

Erik parked his Mazda in the park’n’ride lot next to the freeway entrance.

“Where are we going?” Charles asked.

“I love that you never ask me that until we get where we’re going. Here, put a scarf on. Don’t you own a scarf?” Erik tossed a scarf at Charles. “You can give that back, so don’t feel like you have to pay for it.” Erik still didn’t understand why Charles was so adamant about paying him back for that shopping spree, but he tolerated the money Charles sent him by Venmo every paycheck. Last paycheck, he’d tried telling Charles he’d finished paying him back, but Charles produced a spreadsheet that showed he hadn’t.

Erik got out of the Mazda, pulling a knit cap down over his ears and checking to make sure Charles was wearing a hat with his puffy coat and fuzzy gloves.

He was.

“Where are we going?” Charles repeated, taking a running half-step to catch up with Erik’s long stride.

“The overpass.” Erik pressed the button for the crosswalk by the freeway entrance.

“Are you going to tell me why we’re going to go hang out on a freeway overpass when it’s 20 fucking degrees on a Saturday in December when we could be indoors with Coke and video games?”

“It’s 36 degrees,” Erik corrected him.

“Don’t change the subject!”

“I like overpasses,” Erik said. This one had an eight-foot chain link fence separating the pedestrian walkway from the two lane bridge next to them. There was no wind today, but the noise from the passing cars beneath them was loud enough that they almost had to yell to be heard. The cold air smelled of exhaust.

Ever since his mutation had manifested when he was 12, Erik had been forbidden to play with it. Having been conditioned by his ADHD to believe the adults when they said something was wrong with him, Erik knuckled under to this limit too, or at least, he obeyed as much as he could. Like his ADHD, Erik didn’t exactly choose how much influence his mutation had over his life and his worldview. Even when he wished it would stay within the bounds that his mother had set, his mutation had a way of leaking out. Besides, he loved his mutation in a way that he didn’t love his ADHD. Metal enthralled him, drew him, spun a magnetic field that took in Erik’s mind and heart, sparking in the electrical connections of his brain and the iron in his blood. Erik didn’t mean to disobey his mother, but his mutation demanded his obedience too.

Sitting on the overpass as a young teen, feeling the cars zipping by underneath, sensing the magnetic fields, the motion, the charge in the atoms, was something he could do without anyone suspecting he was doing anything. By his second or third hour of simply sensing every bit of metal and magnetism within range of his power, Erik would very nearly enter a trance, a meditative state focused entirely on the metallokinesis humming in his DNA and its connection to the world around him. His ADHD never interrupted his communion with magnetism; instead, his ability to hyperfocus wiped out any sense of the passage of time. Forbidden from experimenting with the strength of his power, Erik had focused on precision. Tiny things. Wires, lock tumblers, even atoms. The attunement to the magnetic fields and their component atoms was what gave him enough control to defuse Alex’s plasma blast two weeks ago. 

It all started on an overpass.

After winning the argument with Charles about whether or not he needed to practice his telepathy and whether or not this was ethical, Erik gestured at the road beneath them. “You’re not hurting anyone. Just skim minds. Get used to the feel of the minds without shielding all the time.” In a lot of ways, Charles’ power was handicapped the same way Erik’s was. He’d been taught never to practice with it. Of course he had no idea how to control it in dangerous situations like linking minds with out-of-control mutants.

Erik felt Charles’ shields come down, and the faint buzz of dozens of minds, increasing and decreasing in a mental Doppler effect. “Do you mean to be spilling over into my mind? Keep it cleaner, Charles. When you’re reading a mind, the person standing next to you shouldn’t be able to look through your mind into someone else’s.”

Charles quirked his eyebrows down, but he nodded, and the amorphous feel of Charles’ telepathy receded from Erik’s consciousness. Sometimes Charles had his eyes closed, sometimes he studied the cars beneath them, as if following with his eyes the minds he was tracking with his telepathy. It gave Erik plenty of uninterrupted time to just look at Charles, which was one of his favorite pastimes. Dark brown hair peeked out from the edges of his knit hat, and the tip of his nose was turning red in the cold.

“This would be easier if I didn’t have you projecting thoughts at me,” Charles said. “And please don’t use words like ‘adorable.’ I find that patronizing.”

“Mm,” Erik said. “Practice your focus better. You should be able to shield my thoughts out, while still reading the minds of others.”

“You just don’t want to stop thinking that I’m adorable,” Charles groused at him. He rubbed his cold nose with the palm of his gloved hand.

“That too,” Erik agreed. 

Charles gave him that combination of a scowl and a smile that made Erik want to start shopping for rings, and then turned back to the freeway.

They stood out there for the better part of an hour before Erik noticed that Charles kept bouncing.

“Do you need to pee?”

“My toes are nearly frozen, thank you very much. Are we leaving yet?” Charles took his cold-reddened fingers off his temple and stuffed them back into his gloves. 

“Why don’t you have boots?”

“I’m buying my own boots!”

Charles was so touchy about things like that.

“Pass the quiz I just made up, and we’ll leave.”

Charles bit the finger of his glove to pull it off, making sure it was the middle finger and his glove flipped off Erik. He put his bare fingers to his temple, up under his knit cap.

“Alright. Count the people in that SUV.” Erik pointed at a black Jeep Wrangler. 

Charles had a few seconds before the Jeep passed under their bridge and then out of his range. “Mom, daughter, baby in a carseat,” he said. “They’re going to grandma’s house.”

“Good. Now that one.” Erik pointed at a Mazda sedan.

“Man driving alone. He’s thinking about quitting his job after the holidays.”

“That one.”

“Two sisters and three kids. Husbands are hanging drywall in one of their basements.”

“That one.”

“One guy, just bought his kid a laptop for Christmas.”

“Good.”

“Yeah.” Charles grinned at Erik, taking his frozen fingers off his head and pulling his glove back on.

“Did anyone notice you?”

“No, I can just touch down, skim the very surface, and be gone without disturbing them,” Charles said. “I thought everyone noticed telepathy.”

Erik hooked gloved fingers into the chain link and watched the cars zip under them. “I didn’t, that time you got in my head at the Pentagon. You need to practice sneaking around. Are they all humans?”

Charles took his glove off again. “Everyone I’ve read so far is.”

“Can you tell the difference between a baseline and a mutant just be reading minds?” Erik asked.

“I’ve never thought about it. Just a second.” Charles set his fingers to his temple and closed his eyes. “That’s interesting. There is a bit of a buzz, an extra set of electrical activity in the brain, in some minds. Odd. I’ve only ever read one mind at a time before. I think I have felt this buzz from mutant minds. I could be wrong, though. I need more research.”

“What a good little lawyer you are, Charles, refusing to draw a factual conclusion without conducting discovery,” Erik told him.

Charles gave him a disgusted look.

“Find a mind with that buzz, then go deep enough to see if it’s really a mutation,” Erik suggested.

“Then I’ll have to find a mind without that extra buzz, and see if they’re baseline,” Charles said.

“One at a time,” Erik replied.

Charles set his fingers against his temple and his eyes faded into somewhere faraway. 

“There,” Charles pointed. “There’s a mutant in the silver Honda. Teenager. Folks moved the whole family here four years ago when he manifested.”

“Not bad,” Erik said, with those raised eyebrows and approving frown that always made Charles smile in response. “What’s his mutation?”

“Physical Enhancement classification, something about fast reflexes and climbing. He was out of my range before I could narrow it down. We ought to go people watching at the mall so I have enough time to check if that mental buzz always signals a mutation.” He stuffed his hand back into his glove and then back into his pocket. 

“Do you want to go to the mall?” Erik asked.

“Yeah, I can look for boots too.”

“Okay, one last one. Find someone singing along to the radio.”

Charles laughed. Erik had relaxed around Charles so much that he’d gone back to singing along with the radio when driving with Charles. When Charles teased him about it, Erik insisted that everyone did it. Still grinning, Charles set his fingers to his temple again and closed his eyes.

Erik felt the mental jerk from Charles before he said anything. 

“Erik! She’s asleep at the wheel! The red Toyota!” Charles shoved the image into Erik’s mind, as the Toyota drifted across the center lane and into oncoming traffic. Charles couldn’t wake up the driver without crossing his blocks, and even if he did, it would take the driver too long to react.

Erik flung out a hand and grabbed the red Toyota Highlander. At the same time he rippled out a magnetic field in a wave, guiding the silver Saab Aero around the space where the Highlander had been before it could spin out, and then sending out waves, accordion-like, to slow and stop traffic evenly enough that there weren’t any secondary accidents. The Toyota drove itself across the two lanes of stopped cars and parked itself on the shoulder, shifting into park and turning off the engine. 

Not a horn, not a skid, not a crunch of metal.

Erik eased back as all the cars did what he wanted, exactly when he wanted them to do it. He released his hold on the traffic and the cars started driving again. He leaned his head against the chain link, which stood straight and untouched, fingers curled around the metal links. A shiver that started in his power seized him and shook every cell of his body, like a creature that just realized that the bars of its cage might not be as solid as expected. He’d never done anything like that before, nothing that big. He opened his eyes and watched the red Toyota. A silver Chevy minivan had pulled up behind it. Two people got out and approached the Toyota Highlander, one of them on a cell phone.

“She’s alright, isn’t she?” Erik asked Charles.

_ Bloody fucking hell, Erik! _

Oh damn, oh fuck, oh shit. The realization of what he’d just done broke over Erik like a wave, fear and guilt flowing over every warning he’d ever heard, all of them in his mother’s voice. In his mind, he could hear her crying again, fear of what they would do to Erik if anyone ever knew what his real mutation was. 

“I thought you were embarrassed that your telekinesis was so weak, and that’s why you never wanted to talk about your mutation!”

Erik turned his head to look at Charles. His face was numb with shock, fingers still pressed to his temple.

“Are you in my head?” The privacy blocks that Erik kept around his mutation were gone in the blast of power.

He read the answer in Charles’ expression. 

“I’m metallokinetic, just like Max Eisenhardt,” Erik said. That was the first time he’d ever said that out loud. That shiver seized his cells again, his power surging through his mind and his blood, sparking in the electrical connections between the neurons in his brain and then it pushed him aside and flashed out in a bid for independence. The chainlink fence crumpled and the rebar in the bridge groaned. Erik heard the cement start to crack. Power lines fizzed and the electrical systems in the cars driving below them shorted out.

Charles grabbed his head in his hands and pressed their foreheads together. Erik’s mind was abruptly more Charles than Erik, his presence coating Erik’s thoughts. Erik’s instinct was to fight, but a lifetime of therapy and medication to tame his impulse control interfered, and Erik cooperated instead. He seized Charles’ soothing presence and held on tightly until he felt his power drawing back from the edges, gathering back up into the core where he forced it to stay.

“We need to get out of here,” Charles said.

Erik nodded. 

“Can you fix the fence?”

The chainlink was twisted and bowed down before Erik. He tested the idea of using just enough power to straighten it out. No. It would burst out all over again. He shook his head.

“We’re going. Now.” Charles put one hand on his arm, and steered him by the shoulder with the other, hurrying him off the overpass.

“The bridge is damaged. I damaged the rebar. They won’t see the cracks,” Erik said.

“I’ll tell someone.”

“How? You can’t tell them it was me!” Was Charles going to report him?

“I’ll post a suggestion on the city Facebook page! How long have you known you could do that? Give me your car keys, you’re in no condition to drive.”

Erik was thrumming with power so close to the surface that he could accidentally levitate his Mazda into orbit. So, yeah, he shouldn’t be driving. “I didn’t bring the keys.”

“Can you turn it on without blowing us up?”

“We’re only a few miles from home. We can walk if we need to.”

Charles took a deep breath, and Erik finally noticed that not all of the fear in his head belonged to him. “Someone is going to figure out the epicenter of that EMP you just sent out, and the first suspicion is going to be a terrorist attack of some sort. The second suspicion is going to be a mutant. The faster we can get out of here, the better.”

“Get in the driver's seat,” Erik instructed Charles, letting himself into the passenger side.

Charles got in and adjusted the seat position. Erik took Charles’ hands and set them to the sides of his head. “Like you did on the bridge. Calm everything down and just think about the ignition starting.” Erik set fingertips to the ignition.

“I can’t try and control your mutation! That will cross my blocks!”

“It’s not control, Charles, it’s calm. You did it on the bridge. You’ve done it for Marie already. You’re not calming me down, you’re letting me feel how calm you are and that puts me back in control.” 

“I’m not calm! I’m totally freaking out!”

“Underneath the freak out,” Erik said. He pressed his hands over Charles’ fingers that were set to his head. Charles’ presence in his mind settled down. Erik had learned how to do this with therapists and his parents. When the emotional storms of his ADHD and anxiety took over, sensory contact with someone else could help. He matched his breaths to Charles’ breaths and focused on Charles as a sensory presence, warmth and color and sound and touch. The way Erik saw it, there was some sort of emotional connection generated when two people willed the connection into existence. It let Erik borrow calming emotions from someone he loved and trusted, like his mother, father, therapist, and now Charles. This wouldn’t cross Charles’ blocks because it didn’t require telepathy.

After a moment, Erik drew Charles’ fingers down his temples to his face, and then turned his head to press a kiss into Charles’ palm before releasing his hands entirely. With a tap of his fingers on the ignition, the Mazda’s engine started.

“Get us out of here,” Erik said. He leaned his head back against the headrest and concentrated on breathing in through his nose and out through his mouth, counting to keep the breaths even. That power explosion had felt like one of his ADHD overloads.

In the distance, he heard sirens.

* * *

Charles now had three students in his ad hoc school for mutants who couldn’t control their dangerous abilities, although Erik was camouflaged as Charles’ friend. Marie gave them both an ecstatic smile when Charles said Erik would be attending regularly, and Alex contributed a knowing smirk. Charles was beyond feeling awkward at everyone’s assumption that they were dating, and just let it stand because it explained Erik’s presence without anyone asking questions about what mutation Erik couldn’t control.

The difficulty with Erik was that Charles suspected that Erik didn’t really want to learn to control his mutation, if that meant not using it. 

“This isn’t about control; it’s more about suppression,” Erik said one week after they’d dropped off Marie and admired Logan’s progress on renovating the kitchen.

“It has to be about suppression, Erik, but conscious suppression by the mutant without needing any drugs or human supervision. If the mutant can take control, the baselines don’t get involved. That’s the goal. You know that.”

“What if somebody wants to control his power  _ and _ use it?” Erik pressed.

Charles didn’t say that Erik could use his power on a small scale, the way he already did. He knew that wasn’t what Erik was talking about. There was a sense of compression around Erik’s power now, as if he was holding in something that wanted to burst out all over. He couldn’t suggest an MPAL either. The Mutant Power Authorization License could only be requested by a baseline employer, and required a detailed description of the mutant’s power.

“Some power can be used, Erik, but not yours,” Charles said at last.

Erik didn’t answer, not out loud. Charles brushed his fingertips over his temples, disguising the motion as settling his hair into place, and skimmed Erik’s mind. There was a wordless discontent, a rumble of suppressed power, and Erik’s habitual anger at the rules of a baseline and neurotypical society that kept telling him that he was the one who had it all wrong.

* * *

“Sir?”

Lieutenant General Swann looked up from the report he was reading.

“I’ve got the supplemental police report from Avalon about the anomalous EMP. They conclude the radius was about half a mile. Other than fried circuitry in personal civilian electronics, there was no real damage. No communication centers or power grids were affected,” Captain Hallikans stated. She set a paper file on his desk. “The details are on the P drive, under password seal.”

Swann flipped open the file and paged through to find the map. “The epicenter was a highway?”

“It’s likely it was the bridge over the highway. The next photo is of the bridge. You can see the fence. The damage is new, and nothing else was affected. The official working theory is that the EMP originated from a device on the bridge, and that’s the cause of the physical damage to the chain link fence.”

“Why are they assuming the EMP originated from a device and not a person?” Swann asked.

“We could nudge them in that direction, if you think it advisable,” Hallikans replied.

Swann blew out a long sigh and gestured for Hallikans to take a seat. “I don’t want to nudge them in that direction. Not yet.” 

Because of the Mutant Non-Combatant Treaty, the military had no authority over mutant investigations. Swann was using some discretionary resources to look into Erik Lehnsherr’s background, but it wasn’t an activity that would be approved for further investigation. The FBI would take over the investigation if they suspected mutant activity, and Swann didn’t want to escalate the matter that far. 

“Permission to know what we’re waiting for,” Hallikans said deferentially.

“For my gut to tell me it’s the right thing to do. You read McKee’s report about the Claremont High School Miracle?” Swann asked.

“Yes, sir.” 

The Claremont High School Miracle (named by a reporter) was the shooting that wasn’t. Thirteen years ago, a shooter crashed a high school basketball game in Pearler, Virginia with enough ammo to cause a bloodbath, with two bombs on timers in the parking lot, set to blow right about the time a crowd of evacuees would be streaming out of the building. Instead, when the shooter pulled the trigger, the gun backfired, violating the laws of physics to send one bullet through the shooter’s left eye and explode in his brain. The bombs were duds. The bomb squad found them two hours later.

“Have they confirmed that Lehnsherr was at that basketball game?” Hallikans asked.

“He was on the basketball team. Lehnsherr played forward in that game. Scored 8 points before the shooting broke it up.” 

“I saw the photos of the bomb wiring.”

“Yeah, something else, isn’t it?” Swann said. The bombs didn’t go off because the ignition wires had melted. The forensic team found traces of the melted wiring dripped over the casing. “Captain, what’s your opinion on the EMP? Deliberate destruction? Accident? Rehearsal for something bigger?”

“The location was poorly chosen if the purpose was destruction. And if it was a rehearsal, it was foolish to reveal capabilities without achieving anything. The conclusion that I believe fits the evidence is that this was an accident.”

“Agreed.” 

“It’s possible we’ve found a metallokinetic, sir, one not entirely in control of his powers.”

“The Claremont High Miracle required pinpoint control,” Swann pointed out.

“Some mutants have inconsistent control of their powers.”

“Scary thought.”

“Next step, sir?” Hallikans asked.

“We’ll discuss that at Thursday’s meeting. Thanks for your work, Captain.”

“Yes, sir.” Hallikans pulled the door shut behind her as she left.

Swann sorted through the folder Hallikans had left on his desk. Besides the photos, there were interview notes from the people affected. Most were repetitive: they’d been driving down SR-29 when the electrical systems in their car had shorted out, also frying their cell phones and any other electronics. He paged through them. Hallikans had highlighted two interviews towards the end of the packet with an unusual detail in them. One was from a woman who said she’d fallen asleep at the wheel of her Toyota Highlander and woken up, safely parked on the side of the road, engine off, all electrical systems in the car destroyed. Another was from a driver of a Saab Aero who said he’d almost hit a red SUV when his car had slowed and swerved to miss it, without him braking or steering. That driver had kept going, and was outside the range of the EMP when it went off.

Swann retrieved a paper file from a filing cabinet and spread the photos out on his desk. Lehnsherr’s high school yearbook photo and driver’s license photo sat next to a few candid shots they’d pulled off social media. The man didn’t smile much, not even at parties, where he looked more stressed out than relaxed. He’d been fingerprinted and background checked to get a law license, so they knew he didn’t have a police record, not even a speeding ticket. He was clean as a whistle.

Telekinetic, he’d said at the meeting four months ago. He’d floated the small metal toy to prove it. Swann had it locked in a drawer. The toy logo in the corner was blurred and misshapen. He’d checked Hasbro’s line of fidget toys and hadn’t found anything that looked like the little box and lever he’d taken from Erik Lehnsherr. Swann had a hard time believing that a toy company would market a fidget toy with the sharp metal edges of Lehnsherr’s fidget toy. He’d spent an hour combing through fidget toys on Amazon and had not found anything similar.

Lehnsherr wasn’t telekinetic enough to pick up a business card.

The file contained photos of his parents too. Jakob Lehnsherr was a retired office worker, a thoroughly polite and unobjectionable HR manager who liked to rebuild classic cars and went to synagogue twice a month. Edie Lehnsherr almost didn’t exist. There were several Edie Smiths, but none who had a son named Erik. 

The second file contained a black-and-white photo of nine-year-old Edith Eisenhardt, photographed for a passport she never used after it was issued. Her parents, Max and Wanda Eisenhardt had gotten the three of them passports when they’d had plans to emigrate to Israel in 1958, and then changed their minds. 

There was also a grainy newspaper photo of fifteen-year-old Edith Eisenhardt, standing slightly behind her parents. The article was about the opening of Genosha, and Max and Wanda’s invitation for any mutant to come join them. Genosha had started out as a sanctuary. That fact frequently got overlooked because it militarized so quickly. Edith had her hair pulled back in a bun, with a few pin curls at her forehead.

Edith Eisenhardt dropped out of existence after that photo in Genosha. 

Edie Lehnsherr had no official history before her marriage. The marriage license listed ‘Maximoff’ as her maiden name. There was no birth certificate for anyone named Edie Maximoff. There was no record they could find of her high school graduation, although admittedly the school records from 1967 were hard to track down. She’d never held a job, so had never given anyone a Social Security number. All their finances were solely in Jakob’s name. It wasn’t unprecedented for a woman of that age to leave all financial issues to her husband, but it did make establishing her identity difficult. Her driver’s license had been issued under her married name, when she was twenty-six. Her birthday made her exactly one year and one day younger than Edith Eisenhardt.

Swann set the photo of fifteen-year-old Edith Eisenhardt next to the photo of seventy-year-old Edie Lehnsherr. He set the photo of thirty-year-old Erik Lehnsherr next to the photo of Max Eisenhardt.

Then he picked up the phone and called Logan Howlett.


End file.
